'Vs.*.-, F*-% 


-• 'J » 


Viv.: ± 


'. i 

. .*j• «„ * ' f.fj. t , 

* '7 •; t - V' v* , • 

: m: 

' . ; £-y • 


• .: ' : * •<. *v*.*//*• t, f ,'*w; v ^r* 

- : 

• i , * •/ ' , ■ • S ?*%/ i* /'-/V ' : * v - V‘»i 

• * * •.: 7 'Vj < • -Vv .. /?**•’{«'* 

. . ! '■« '. ? f'J! ... / .: \ I. ‘■ -x 1 ' v' 

7 , :v. 7 - 

• ■; ■'.-Vv. 

; ' ’ •. / V- ; 






•* •] . . '• * , t r '\‘ • ’ V?V 

■ ’ * •.*. ’ ‘I / • .v; 

‘f , / ' • ’ .fr-t- 

V ' • ■ « 

. ■ o * 

'•••.-• ’ •’ . 72 J 

• - • • . ‘ ' . 

.... -r. _ . 


.t. .* *. 


i'-U. 


\ •, . : J /> 
*'• V < 7 % • . • 

.1 «.'■•- - . • » 
r/> V a' V * 

• X •' ‘ L' - . . 

V .‘ ?.i 4 • 

■ \ ' • 

,r /V* .»• r • «. . • 

V •. ■ 

, A /,V>». * .V v*, ,v <. 

* • ► v . > i • , . \' • • . , 


V; ••-v 

mv\.» 




v-iV'-'V’ . 


* •/-'* j ■; , 


: V,... ■ . ■■'-■. ■■■ ■ < ■ 

■V .V<\ v<; .. .. 

r t " r V*..vVr, * >.(■ ’ hi't 

■< 

% ' 


M m* 

,?• >»Vlf 

’ fPS‘t '7 

c 4 ■ 
> 


-P- 

>•£%-« 


V • \ V -J. 


•S>»ifp 




.»V*i 


p? 

Ijfl 


ir ®7 






V; 




i>v? 


:”{• »» •J',- M' . ’ V. 

7 w J \ 4 * • ' " 

- v.\%*, M.'* •-.* ♦ f . 

nc’Mtii* c .v 1 •. • 


Lhw. 






r 
























Gass _ 

Bon k _ 

T>JU 

Copyright N?_ C*-: y •,, 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 

















THE TREBLE CLEF 



BOOKS BY EDWARD C. BOOTH 


I 
f 

I 
I 

I 

I 

I 
I 
I 
1 


BELLA 

THE POST GIRL 

“The Post Girl ” is the American 
title of “The Cliff End” 

THE DOCTOR’S LASS 
FONDIE 

THE TREE OF THE GARDEN 
MISS PARKWORTH 























Copyright, 1924 

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Ino. 



PRINTED IN U. S. A. 


Cl A 8 0 8551 1, 


VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC. 



BINOHAMTON AND NEW YORK 

m 29 74 



To 

FREDERICK and AGNES DAWSON 


IN FRIENDSHIP 


























CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I The Sausage Boy.1 

II The Best of Fathers.53 

III The Chorister. 79 

IV The Alderman.118 

V The Councillor.143 

VI The Organist.206 

VII The Suitor.269 

VIII The Dark Angel .327 

IX The Choice.351 

X The Crucible.397 

XI The Sacrifice.439 

































































































































































- 
























s i 




























- 
























































































































THE TREBLE CLEF 


BOOK I 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


L ET us begin municipally. 

On a night in late-Victorian November, whilst 
the years of our Lord still moved (some say 
more virtuously than these) among the prim and fast 
growing venerable eighteens, the Mayor of Daneborough 
was giving a party. 

It was not a Banquet as had been anticipated, and for 
that reason some of the more substantial among the 
Burgesses and City Fathers disposed to murmur, saying 
the Dignity of the Office was being Brought Down. It 
was, in fact, a children’s Party, a juvenile fancy dress 
Ball, and by not a few nonconformist electors in the 
Mayor’s own ward this civic countenance of so repre¬ 
hensible a practice for youth was deprecated, being trans¬ 
lated as a direct reflection upon his predecessor in office, 
who held public happiness in as much abhorrence as a 
naked leg. Throughout the ex-Mayor’s term of office no 
wine had reddened a goblet nor foot slid over the waxed 
floor of the shrouded ballroom—which passed a whole year 
swathed in holland, save when it echoed the eloquence of 
frock-coated Missionaries and Temperance Orators, or 
simmered with the fervour of feminine meetings for the 
propagation of Christian Endeavour. But the present 
Major, who had a wife and family to consider, was a 


2 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


professed churchman of the Broad School, by which toler¬ 
antly comprehensive term he designated the whole aggre¬ 
gate of his personal opinions, and held himself superior 
to every form of bigotry not his own. The Party was 
ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of his eldest daughter, 
so that in late life she should look back with pride on 
having commemorated her fourteenth anniversary with 
civic honours, and it might also serve (the Mayoress 
hoped) to furnish her family with more social advantages 
than private life had hitherto provided for them. 

Touching the night itself, nothing (surely) could have 
been more auspicious. There was an autumnal moisture 
in the air; a smell of fading leaf and smoke, mingled with 
a remote redolence of smouldering cartridge paper; a dim 
Guy Fawkes atmosphere derived from Chinese crackers 
and belated squibs that still sputtered abortively at street 
corners in survival of the fiery festival, or vomited their 
terrifying sparks through keyholes and letter-boxes of the 
unprotected, where emulators of the great Guido had 
thrust them. There was a thin yellow mist—the very 
emblem of municipality—that wrapped up each street 
lamp in a halo, like a sick face in a blanket, and gave it 
a swollen and lugubrious, yet a civic and seasonable look. 
Some of this mist, deposited solidly on the street flags, 
damped and darkened them, so that they gleamed dully 
beneath the rays of the gas lamps and the treacly light 
that stuck to shop windows and open doors. 

Round one of these doors in one of Daneborough’s 
smaller residential streets a group of children was gath¬ 
ered. It had begun with the most exemplary intent to 
form and to maintain a double line between the doorway 
and an attendant cab, drawn up by the kerb, but under 
the influence of a tense excitement and the agitated com¬ 
pression of numbers it shifted its shape violently and 
incessantly, varying from that of a twisted hor^-shoe to 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


3 


no shape at all. By the fascination with which its agi¬ 
tated components glued their eyes upon the door and 
strove among themselves for priority of place, it was 
plain that events of no ordinary importance were in pro¬ 
gress. From time to time the door,—which, not less agi¬ 
tated by unseen influences than the crowd dependent on 
it, was never altogether closed,—opened mysteriously, 
and a child’s head, emerging at a height somewhat lower 
than that of the knob, called out anxiously to the cab- 
driver: “She won’t be long.” Adding as though in com¬ 
munication with another and more authoritative voice, 
inaudible to the expectant crowd, whose utterance it re¬ 
ceived and transmitted: “You’re to stay there. You’re 
not to go. She’s got her frock on 1” To which the cab¬ 
man, betraying signs of a natural moroseness or of im¬ 
patience due to delay, and expectorating belligerently on 
the kerb, retorted in a voice a shade or two foggier than 
the night, and less genial: “Tell ’em to hurry up, 
d’y’ear? Tell ’em to look sharp. This isn’t the only 
job, tell ’em. I’ve got three more orders for 7-20 be¬ 
sides theirs. How much longer are they going to be?” 

Receiving no answer from the door, which was again 
pushed mysteriously to, he turned upon the horse, whose 
profile he scanned with an eye of growing displeasure, 
venting his wrath at last in an explosive: “Hod up!” 

The horse, a flinching sad-mouthed animal of a useful 
nondescript colour that could, and did, (as emergency 
demanded) serve with equal propriety in a bridal coach 
or funeral hearse, thus vehemently awakened out of 
dreams, threw up its head at the objurgation and shook 
all its harness so violently as to startle cries of alarm 
from the group and precipitate several of the more im¬ 
portunate members over the doorstep. The cabman ap¬ 
peared to take this natural action of his horse as a per¬ 
sonal affront. Looking the animal up and down from 


4 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


end to end with an eye of withering scorn, he seized it 
by the rein which he tugged two or three times with 
vigour as if pulling a refractory doorbell, crying “Woa! 
What! Would you!” Still holding it masterfully by 
the rein with his right hand he threatened its evasive muz¬ 
zle with a menaceful left fist that caused the animal to 
brandish its head wildly aloft like a butcher’s cleaver, and 
to chew the lamp-lit fog with its yellow teeth to the great 
dismay of the crowd. 

This altercation between the driver and his steed, which 
had seemed likely to be protracted, was brought to a 
sudden end by the reappearance of the forehead under 
the doorknob, that cried excitedly: “Hey! They’re 
coming now. She’s ready. They’re wrapping her up. 
You’re to stay there”—and ran back to take part in 
what seemed to be a ceremony of importance. From a 
staircase at the immediate end of the narrow passage 
now revealed to view there descended with some precipi¬ 
tation a considerable party of people; adults and children 
confusedly mixed; all animated by a very visible excite¬ 
ment. The children ran backward, clapping their hands; 
the adults were flushed and voluble. One of them, a man 
with a brown beard, carried in his arms a little girl en¬ 
veloped in innumerable shawls, whose face against his 
shoulder shone singularly white, with a waxen polish on 
her brow, as though but lately resurrected from a sickbed. 
It was remarked by the spectators—stirred now to such 
a pitch of intensity that the foreheads of the outer flanks 
collided—that the two legs depending limply from the 
bearer’s arms were clad in stockings of the palest blue, 
and that there was lace on her frock. Behind her came 
a little boy muffled up to the ears in an overcoat and led 
by the hand. On his head was a black and yellow cricket 
cap, and white stockings were visible beneath the great 
coat. An adult followed with a highly stained cricket 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


5 


bat, begging the community on no account to forget it. 
The little boy’s patent slippers squeaked loudly as he 
walked, and though he gazed fixedly at the crowd that 
awaited him by the door, it seemed to be some other self 
rather than his own that occupied, perplexed, this un¬ 
accustomed raiment. 

The little girl, having been deposited in the profundi¬ 
ties of the cab (where she made miraculous recovery of her 
limbs and animation in a moment), the little boy, lifted 
across the humid pavement, was bestowed beside her. 
There ensued an excited recapitulation of instructions, 
rendered by so many voices as to resemble not unremotely 
some chorus from an oratorio. “Be sure and look after 
her, Freddie.” “Alice, be sure and look after Freddie.” 
“Has he blown his nose?” “Don’t push bat through 
cab-window, now! Hold it down.” “Have they got 
their hankerchers ?” A sudden voice of consternation 
demanded “Which on ’em’s got the invitation card?”— 
a timely suggestion that served to throw the cab into 
convulsions, all the adults thrusting themselves through 
the doorway together so that, had the sad-mouthed horse 
but chosen this moment to move on, there must have been 
a heavy demand on the casual ward at the Infirmary. 
The cards, ultimately discovered in the right-hand pocket 
of the little boy’s overcoat, where some adult and prudent 
hand had previously placed them, were for safety’s sake 
transferred to the left, though even this procedure was 
not without its disputants, one asking: “Wouldn’t he 
be better with them in his hand?” and another: “Aye, 
but what about bat?” and a third: “Why! Let him 
carry bat, and gie cards to Lucy,” and a fourth, smit¬ 
ten with misgivings: “Bat! Why, what’s gotten it? 
Where’s bat now? Who’s seen bat? Has Freddie got 
bat? As like as not he hasn’t. Show us bat, Freddie!” 
And the bat being groped for at the bottom of the cab, 


6 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


where it had been suffered to lapse during the quest for 
the cards, and publicly displayed to the great peril of 
the cab-window: “Remember” (its owner was admon¬ 
ished) “there’s two cards. Yours and Lucy’s. You’re 
not to give ’em up to nobody while you get to Mansion 
House, think on, or they won’t let you in . . .” At 
which the cabman, long smouldering under all this re¬ 
tardation of affairs, succeeded in his manoeuvre to seize 
hold of the door handle at last, and had every appearance 
of being about to slam the door with prodigious violence 
when his intention was frustrated by a startling scream: 

“His fingers! His fingers!” 

The infection of alarm thrilled through the house party 
like a shudder, and even the children and the cabdriver 
were visibly awed. It seemed as if disaster had in truth 
befallen. 

“I never seed his fingers,” the cabdriver murmured in 
sullen self-defence. “Where’d he put ’em?” 

“It’s not where he’d put ’em,” the originator of the 

scream replied, “but where he might ’a put ’em. My 

word, it’s gave me quite a turn.” A chorus of outraged 
voices assented, “Why, no wonder. An’ me an’ all.” 
“Child might have had his hand trapped off!” “Folks 
can never be too careful how they shut doors when there’s 

children about.” “Are you all right, Freddie?” “Hold 

up your hand. Which hand was it?” “His right. My 
word. Might ’a lamed him.” “Doors should never be 
slammed, missus. Not even if folks is in a temper. One 
never knows what might come of it.” “It’s a good thing 
you thought to stop him in time.” 

The cabdriver, humiliated and murmurous after this 
fruitless expenditure of anxiety and precious time, stood 
holding the offending door ajar. “Is his fingers all right 
now? Can I shut ’em up this time? I shall never get 
them other orders done to-night.” A frantic clamour 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


7 


of warnings, reinforced with every gesture of command 
and supplication, appealing hands and shaking fists, burst 
forth from the adult party. “Freddy!” “Lucy!” 
“Stand back, do you hear! He’s going to shut door.” 
Which the irate driver did with the suppressed violence 
of a blasphemy, and clambering upon the box drew the 
chaff-strewn horsecloth around his nether limbs with as 
much injured dignity as if it had been some minor and 
dishonoured prophet’s mantle. 

“The Mansion House,” he was directed from below. 
“The Mansion House. Tell him the Mansion House. 
To the Mansion House.” The cab, rumbling like dis¬ 
tant thunder and grating sparks from the kerb with its 
iron tyres, lunged into the mist. Moroseness, wrapped 
in a horse blanket, sat statuesquely on the box; the spirit 
of protest thumped between the ribs of the bony horse 
and poured in trumpets through its quivering nostrils; 
dulled expectation and dazed excitement palpitated in the 
atmosphere of mildewed cushions within the cab; pride 
and envy followed the cab’s progress from behind, where 
the adults viewed its transit with loquacious satisfaction 
and a disorderly retinue of childhood pursued the rum¬ 
bling vehicle, drawn on by heaven knows what elemental 
instinct to attach themselves vicariously to greatness by 
any nexus however vague and slender, and be some part 
—no matter how fractional or remote—of the cherished 
glories of this night. 


2 

Of the children comprised in this animated group the 
greater number belonged to that class which imparts the 
predominating aroma to school feasts and Sunday schools. 
Their clothing, if not actually ragged, was overworn 
and threadbare, and in its totality impregnated the mist 


8 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


with a foist odour of garments too habitually worn. 
Their faces, despite the eager freshness of youth, be¬ 
trayed even to the dingy cab-lamps the sickliness of skins 
too rarely cleansed; their hands displayed a dull and 
questionable flesh, and finger-nails edged with deepest 
mourning. They pertained in fact, to that order of 
youthful society in which Friday bathnights and Satur¬ 
day pennies were fitful and legendary things; which must 
depend on its own exertions for all its joys in life, being 
reduced to run here and there after funerals, dog-fights, 
street accidents and drunken men, and chase persistently 
behind elusive pleasure. 

But one there was among their number—a little boy— 
to whom these attributes do not apply. At one time he 
had been among the foremost in the gathering, of the 
very germ and nucleus of its growth; a polite and un¬ 
assertive onlooker devoid of speech or motion. But with 
each successive pair of hands he forfeited some part of 
his original advantage, until at last he occupied a modest 
station on the very outskirts of excitement, almost be¬ 
yond reach of the candle-light from the cab’s near lamp, 
that—when some flickering elongation of its beam kindled 
his face—revealed him no true component of the throng 
he mildly haunted, but a constituent foreign and detached. 

Although the round cloth cap he wore, and the woollen 
muffler about his neck, and the knitted gloves and belted 
coat and knickerbockers—all of them black—were week- 
aday and new no longer, there was a care revealed in 
their selection, and a polite and conscious care in his 
wearing of them that hinted at home and a mother’s 
something more than love. Surely that knitted muffler 
round his neck, its ends so scrupulously tucked away into 
the breast of his little coat, had been tied by a mother’s 
hands; none other would have fashioned it so deftly to 
the work it should perform. His face, when now and 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


9 


then he turned it this way or that—and the interest dis¬ 
played on it was never of the unabashed and public sort 
that marked the noisy naked curiosities of his neighbours 
—his face was scarcely less clean than the super-clean 
face of the little girl in the pale blue stockings who 
emerged tired and triumphant from the doorway in the 
arms of the bearded man. It was a delicate and fragile 
face; the brows finely pencilled; the eyes, enlarged and 
softened by their veil of lashes, brown and wistful, whilst 
a small and sensitive mouth whose lips looked as if they 
might have quivered at a word confirmed the impression 
of a childhood still protected from the roughness of the 
world, and rendered more susceptible to it by a mother’s 
sheltering love. 

For a brief while after the cab had rolled away, he 
rested pensive and solitary on the kerb, and truth com¬ 
pels the admission that in his troubled heart there even 
welled a yearning (shameful and unworthy of a gentle¬ 
man, he knew) to pursue this phantom and portentous 
vehicle so wondrously compounded of mist and lamplight 
and its own rumble to the very gateway of the Mayor’s 
great house in the High Gate, and there be witness of 
the converging of all these individual glories, and let 
his lips vicariously touch the rim of that cup of brim¬ 
ming happiness which the mayoral hospitality extended 
not to him. Instead, he detached himself from his medi¬ 
tations with a guilty start, drew up resolutely in turn 
each wristlet of his knitted gloves with conscious care, 
and set off briskly up the street in a course directly 
opposite to that the cab had taken. 

His step confirmed the impression produced by his 
features and apparel. Other boys—of the sort that had 
pursued the cab—might have broken into a noisy and 
irregular run, kicking loosely at the doorsteps as they 
passed by, or leaping up to bring their mouths for shout- 


10 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ing purposes on a level with each letterbox, or jumping 
the scrapers, or whistling, or brandishing their arms. 
But the little boy in the black woollen gloves and knitted 
comforter displayed none of these attainments. Instead, 
he kept his lips gently but firmly closed, drawing the 
mist and expelling it through two small precise and 
sober nostrils. He walked very silently and shadow-like, 
preserving the conscientious centre of the path; his head 
politely yet not too proudly erect; his gloved hands closed 
and held in due subjection to his sides, without looking 
too much to right or left (save at a corner or street cross¬ 
ing, where in obedience to maternal law he halted and 
made punctilious reconnaissance on all sides of him be¬ 
fore committing his person to the perils of the road). 
For was he not Oswald Holmroyd, the son of the best of 
fathers, and had not his mother’s love exhorted him never 
to lose sight of this fact, nor ever, under any circum¬ 
stances, to forget he was a gentleman? And if his occu¬ 
pation this evening perhaps could scarcely claim to rank 
among the gentlemanly callings commonly accredited, 
might not this be all the better reason for striving to re¬ 
member who and what he was? 

As he pursued his walk, immersed in the filial task of 
Remembering, he was (nevertheless) curiously susceptible 
to cabs. Cabs, in fact, appeared to be on every hand, 
and the rumble of them persisted obstinately in his ears. 
Now, at a street corner, he would have to draw back from 
the kerb whilst some empty and oscillating vehicle, drawn 
by a galloping steed—smoking like a clothes-horse and 
steaming away into the mist as if it were the very source 
of it—rocked tempestuously over the crossing, hot from 
one journey and belated for the next. Or it was a vehi¬ 
cle of more substantial burden, its steamy windows show¬ 
ing blurred and blot-like visages behind the glass and in¬ 
ternal hands rubbing peeping places on the vapoured 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


11 


pane, that rolled with a comfortable motion to the Man¬ 
sion House, where the striped awning flagged humidly 
under the weight of fog, and the two policemen stood by 
the two portly and aldermanic lampposts, and a crimson 
carpet flowed all the way from the Mayoral staircase to 
the pavement’s edge. 

Oswald’s errand took him through the upper end of 
the High Gate—where the High Gate becomes residential 
and calls itself Hill Street—to a big semi-detached house 
in St. Lawrence Square. Only a single and ineffectual 
gaslamp guarded each entrance to the Square, and as the 
houses were ranged on the three sides of a green enclosure, 
the mist—encouraged by the trees and herbage—lay 
somewhat more thickly here, folding these residences away 
from common observation, and enlarging their foggy 
shapes when seen to preternatural magnitude. No sounds 
of noisy childhood disturbed the formal silence of this 
sequestered space, nor Chinese crackers sputtered in the 
gloom. The light that percolated here and there through 
blinds or through the fans over the front doors, or from 
some upper window where more than one gaslit globe 
could be descried gleaming like a sickly moon, spread no 
part of its comfort or hospitality abroad. And perhaps 
to the little Oswald, trying never to forget he was a 
gentleman, this effect of illuminative reserve—as though 
the globes and very gas-jets shone for nobody but their 
owners, and grudged each ray expended in surplus of 
necessity—might be exaggerated. Even gas-jets and 
front doors and railings and bell pulls can present an 
attitude of studious discouragement. 

Yet there is, or surely must be, something in the quality 
of true gentlemanliness that neither night nor mist nor 
silence can conceal. For, noiseless though he tried to be 
(and was) no sooner had the little Oswald reached the 
dim profundity of the porch he sought, than there arose 


12 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


a sudden stir within: a violent and vehement commotion, 
it seemed to him, occasioned by his advent, that robbed 
his paralyzed right arm of any power to reach or ring the 
bell. Disconcerting voices broke out at close quarters 
behind the solid panels of the big front door, and almost 
simultaneously it burst open before his blinking eyes with 
the exclamation: 

“It’s Him at last!” 


3 

Yes, It was Him at last. Him in very truth. Through 
the embarrassment caused by this so cordial and unex¬ 
pected reception pride stirred not unpleasantly within 
the small boy’s bosom. Gentlemanliness, like Virtue, was 
its own reward, then, after all. His mother had been 
right; her counsels were justified. Always, and under 
every circumstance, Be a Gentleman. 

The flood of light let out upon his shrinking eyes daz¬ 
zled him with the bright vision of an apocalyptic hall. 
The very light itself seemed luminously rich as though 
(albeit fed from the same main) of a quality superior 
to that which starved in the municipal gaslamps without. 
The great globe suspended over the chequered tiles seemed 
—to this recent denizen of the dark—bursting with its 
own effulgence; beneath its mellow beams he had the con¬ 
sciousness of rugs and staircases and polished banisters 
and clocks and curtains and impressive human figures in 
the overwhelming plural. The hand that had flung open 
the door so startlingly was red and fleshy, emerging from 
a white starched cuff which, in conjunction with a cap 
and apron, proclaimed itself the property of a maid. 
Simultaneously with the cry “It’s Him!” she stabbed her 
glance into the misty void above Oswald’s head as though 
accrediting him with a stature greater than he owned, 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


13 


and continued without a pause. “Do you call this 7-25? 
What’s use of ordering?” 

What’s use of ordering! 

At a rebuff so unexpected the little Oswald’s spirit, 
so briefly stimulated, as briefly sank. Did he call this 
7-25 ? He had no notion what it was or what they called 
it. What was the use of ordering? Why! What in¬ 
deed! His mouth quivered; his brow fell; a flush—like 
some fabled monster with burning jaws began to swallow 
him wholemeal, from the feet upwards. It was Ended. 
Gentlemanliness was altogether routed and put to shame. 
There would be no orders—for, as the maid had properly 
declared: “What was the use of ordering?” 

He proffered no excuse, but mutely stood, confessing 
fault and penitence with downcast eyes. And the maid’s 
eyes—tempered in the crucible of years of experience for 
answering doors and putting errand boys and beggars in 
their place—after a moment’s conflict with the outer 
darkness, dropped upon the mortified cap and muffler and 
black woollen gloves, and cried in tones of almost incredu¬ 
lous disgust: 

“Well I declare! It isn’t Him mum.” 

A lady’s voice repeated irritably: “Not HIM?” 
“Not Him!” echoed in shrill dismay from the lips of a 
little girl, poised in tense expectancy on the lowermost 
stair with her hand on the volute of the banister. 
“Surely! Whoever is it, then?” asked the lady petu¬ 
lantly. 

“Why . . . it’s the Sausage Boy!” declared the little 
girl, running from the curtail step to the centre of the 
hall in order to take stock of the visitor who was not 
Him, and the Sausage Boy thus by name proclaimed 
deemed the moment opportune to be a Gentleman in ear¬ 
nest, according to strict prescription, which consisted 
in raising the round black cap with the black glove and 


14 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


lowering his eyes and breathing in a voice so politely at¬ 
tenuated as to be not very much more audible than 
Thought: 

“Please . . . Mother sends her compliments and wishes 
to know . . .” 

What his mother, by these complimentary methods, 
wished to know did not immediately transpire, for there 
were things the lady in the hall sought to know too; 
other, more pressing, urgent things that absorbed the 
whole of her attention. 

“Isn’t he there at all, then?” she asked. The maid— 
first brushing the silenced gentleman to one side as she 
stepped into the porch to thrust a scrutinizing head be¬ 
yond its pillars,—exclaimed: “Nay, that he isn’t mum. 
He isn’t anywheres.” 

The lady, whose left arm (as little Oswald, through 
his downcast eyelids dimly noticed) was hid beneath a 
cloud of fleecy wraps and shawls, made peremptory sounds 
of displeasure with her tongue and teeth, and promptly 
subjected the maid to a searching catechism. Was the 
maid quite sure she had given the right time—though to 
be sure their own common sense might have told them! 
Had she particularly mentioned that it was for Mrs. 
Bankett, No. 3 St. Lawrence Square—though to be sure 
the name itself should be quite enough. “Everybody 
knows Mrs. Bankett, St. Lawrence Square.” To which 
the maid, resenting this public reflection on her powers 
of ordering, retaliated with a degree of certitude only 
short of defiance. All these things had she done, and 
given the message twice over—to Him and to Her as 
well—and had stood by and seen it wrote upon the slate. 
“I told ’em particular it was for the Mansion House. 
And both Him and Her promised faithful it shouldn’t be 
forgot. But them cabs is all alike, mum. There’s no 
depending on ’em. They’ll promise anything, cabs will. 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


15 


They want smartening up. That’s what cabs want.” 

The little girl whose mind had been visibly distracted 
between anxiety about the cab and concern to have her 
importance properly acknowledged by this adventitious 
pair of eyes, advanced to the porch under profession of 
looking for the defaulting vehicle, and addressed Oswald. 

“I’m going to the Mayor’s Party. This is my dress. 
I am Little Bo Peep. Here is the crook I have to carry.” 
She held forth a shepherdess’s staff the height of her¬ 
self, wound from the top to bottom with a white ribbon 
and decorated below the crook with a broad pink bow 
twice the size of that she wore in her crimped and golden 
hair. All around her pink skirt ( as she was particular to 
point out to the little boy framed dimly in the porch like 
some old master against a background of mist and dark¬ 
ness) frolicsome fleecy lambs sported in white wool, their 
eyes glittering with glass beads, their tails constituting a 
tasseled fringe. Moreover, to guard against any pos¬ 
sible misconception on the part of an unintelligent public, 
the hem of her frock was boldly encircled with the legend 
(in gilt lettering) : LITTLE BO PEEP HAS LOST 
HER SHEEP. Her shoes and stockings were of the pal¬ 
est (and it seemed to Oswald) costliest silk, of a shade 
for which his limited nomenclature had no name. White 
lace mittens extended from her knuckles to her elbows, 
and these she displayed in turn. “Look, I am to wear 
these. We only exchanged them this morning. The oth¬ 
ers were too large. Aren’t you going to the Party? Of 
course you aren’t. Weren’t you asked? Listen! Is 
that the cab? O, I wish the cab would come. I shall 
be late.” 

All this intelligence and interrogation she poured out 
with such volubility that the most of it was uttered before 
the lady «with the shawls had time to interrupt the 
colloquy, saying: 


16 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Eleanor! Come away from the door. The mist is 
dreadfully thick. You might easily catch cold in those 
thin clothes.” 

And though Oswald, trying hard to be a gentleman, was 
troubled to decide in what appropriate words or manner 
he should acknowledge so great a condescension, his own 
pride, alternately encouraged and depressed, began to 
stir him pleasurably ’again. For he was yet too young 
and inexperienced to know that Vanity does not scruple 
to make use of the meanest mirror to reflect her glory, 
and that even the greatest of this world will stoop to 
warm the fingers of their pride at any comfortable flame, 
without too much inquiry as to the nature of the fuel 
that feeds it. And since, moreover, a flattered vanity is 
the father of affection, the little Oswald was filled on a 
sudden with a deep and fervent and perfectly embarrassing 
devotion to this fairy figure in her silks and furbelows. 
There was no doubt (his gratitude affirmed) that she was 
beautiful. There was no doubt that she was richly 
dressed. Much more beautiful, and much more richly 
dressed than the inanimate young lady with the pendent 
legs and sick and waxen cheek pressed against the man’s 
brown beard, who had been borne out of the gloomy gas¬ 
lit passage and deposited in the recesses of the gloomier 
cab. And even she had stirred the sensitive fancy of the 
little Sausage Boy and kindled within his bosom that in¬ 
flammable material of imagination ever ready to catch the 
quickening spark and burn to the most heroic and noble 
resolves. But O! Not like this one. Not worthy, in¬ 
deed, to be compared with the richly decorated daughter 
of Mrs. Bankett of St. Lawrence Square, whom everybody 
knew. 

Out of his ineffable inner glories he was awakened with 
a start by the sound of Mrs. Bankett’s voice. Deceived 


THE SAUSAGE BOY IT 

by the dimness and silence of the porch into fancying it 
empty, she asked if the little boy were still there. 

Yes, the little boy was still there, and deeming the mo¬ 
ment this time positively at hand for him to be a Gentle¬ 
man in earnest, raised his cap anew and recited in a voice 
as carefully modulated as before the pious formula com¬ 
mitted to his memory: “Please . . . Mother sends her 
compliments and wishes to know . . .” 

He stopped again, for again—by the moving of her lips 
—it seemed there were things Mrs. Bankett also wished to 
know. She wished to know, for instance, (not addressing 
the mist-invaded porch, but the maid) if (perhaps) the 
Sausage Boy would run as far as Jobling’s and tell the 
cab to come at once. The maid, without troubling to 
refer to the porch, told her mistress she was sure he 
would (mum) and turning to Oswald translated Mrs 
Bankett’s query into the present imperative. 

“Missus says you’re to run to Jobling’s and tell cab 
to come at once.” 

“Does he know where Jobling’s is?” Mrs. Bankett in¬ 
terposed. J 

“You know where Jobling’s is, don’t you?” said the 
maid. “Where the cabs come from?” 

“Tell him the Livery Stables,” prompted Mrs. Bankett. 

“Livery Stables . . .” said the maid. 

“In Queen Street,” Mrs. Bankett added. “Just beyond 
the pump, tell him, Mary.” 

“You’ve got to look sharp!” the maid admonished him. 
“Don’t stop anywheres on the way. Go as quick as 
you can, and tell cab to come at once. Mrs. Bankett’s, 
think on. . « She impressed the directions on his 
mind. 

“The name will be sufficient, Mary,” Mrs. Bankett 
threw in from the hall. “Everybody knows my name. 


18 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


But perhaps . . she added prudently, “he had better 
say St. Lawrence Square.” 

“You’re to say St. Lawrence Square,” the maid re¬ 
peated. 

“And the number . . .” Mrs. Bankett said. “Not,” 
her dignity explained, “that there’s any need. But still. 
. . . On a night like this. They’re so stupid. I must 
call round to-morrow. No. 3, tell him.” 

“You’re to tell ’em No. 3,” the maid interpreted as 
Oswald turned to go. “Cab’s been ordered since before 
half past ten this morning, tell ’em. We’re stood waiting 
of ’em, tell ’em. Say they ought to be ashamed of their- 
selves. What’s the good of ordering, tell ’em. Say we 
shall order off of somebody else next time, unless they 
mend. Stop! Hark! Is yon cab coming? . . . No! I 
might ’a known it wasn’t. Everybody’s cab’ll be coming 
but ours. Well? What are you standing and staring 
there for? Do you mean to stop all night? Be off wi’ 
you.” 


Oswald raised his cap politely—albeit to nobody in 
particular, since nobody was looking at him—readjusted 
his gloves and commenced the descent of the four steps, 
that went black as ink the moment he trod on the first of 
them, being cut off from the source of light by the clos¬ 
ing of the door. He had to grope his way to the gate, 
for the brilliance of the big yellow globe so long looked 
at remained imprinted on the fundus of his eye, and in¬ 
terposed complementary blots between that and all he 
sought to see. But once in the square he took to his 
heels, inspired by the pressing importance of the service 
he had been called upon to render, and also by the noblest 
desire to repay the little girl in the pink party frock for 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


19 


the honour she had conferred on him. He would shew 
her how a gentleman could run. She should see with what 
speed a gentleman could deliver messages. He knew 
Queen Street and the erect wooden pump with the stiff 
one arm like a Chelsea pensioner—that in another month’s 
time would be swathed in straw for Christmas, with a 
swollen look as if it had the mumps—and he knew Job- 
ling’s Livery Stables, and the cab was ordered before 
half past ten, and what was the use of ordering, and they 
were waiting of them now, and they ought to be ashamed 
of themselves. All the way he kept rehearsing his in¬ 
structions, saying them over and over to himself with fer¬ 
vour, fearful lest any portion of the committed message 
might escape his memory as he ran. In his kindled zeal 
he longed beyond anything to deliver his instructions in¬ 
tact, down to the smallest particle. As he turned out of 
the square, such was his burning confidence reciprocating 
the confidence reposed in him, he believed he could do it. 
But with each successive step that took him nearer Job- 
ling’s the plastic facility of the phrases seemed to set 
and stiffen. And as he came in sight and scent of Job- 
ling’s yard—which was just off Hill Street, and not more 
than an easy three minutes’ run from St. Lawrence Square 
—the message in his mouth was mixed up with horrible 
misgivings, and memory itself began to falter. 

Outside, against the kerb, stood the pump: the wooden 
pump with whose rigid and rheumatic handle Queen Street 
infancy (under no obligation whatever to be a gentle¬ 
man) was wont to play ride-a-cock-horse, shrouded now 
by the mist that clung broodingly about its person and 
enlarged its bulk to preternatural proportions. And be¬ 
yond the pump yawned the arched and vaulted carriage 
way to Jobling’s yard exhaling pungent equine odours; 
a dark and disconcerting void that engulfed the little 
Oswald’s figure and lent an echoing sepulchral character 


20 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to his faltering footsteps over the unlevel cobbles with 
which the yard was paved—causing him to turn an 
anxious head for reassurance that the pump had not crept 
up behind him. Probing his way forward with both 
hands protectfully outspread, he came at the farther end 
of the vaulted carriage-way upon a stable lamp sus¬ 
pended on a nail. The lamp’s glass was so opaquely 
smoked as to yield no perceptible light whatever; the 
brown flame, half smothered in a sooty deposit, emitted 
a moribund and lugubrious gleam. Had it been Him him¬ 
self, hanging in expiring throes from a wall-hook, the ef¬ 
fect could scarcely have been more disturbing to a Gentle¬ 
man. But he mustered courage to apply his knuckles to 
the door which the expiring lantern was obviously in¬ 
tended to illuminate, and took the liberty to cough—hop¬ 
ing that the cough rather than the knuckles would betray 
his modest presence to whatever other presence had its 
^wful habitation in the darks and silences of this place. 
Three times he knocked upon the door, coughing apolo¬ 
getically on each occasion to let those know who listened 
with what humility he ventured to disturb their peace, 
and held his knuckles already raised to give a fourth and 
final summons—a loud, conclusive summons this, that 
should be audible even to himself—when with startling 
suddenness an unsuspected door at right angles to the 
one he knocked at flew open without a sound, letting out 
an elongated track of light across the glistening cobbles 
with a magnified great shadow projected from the middle 
of it. 

“Who’s there?” demanded a voice after an interval of 
intense silence, in which neither Oswald nor the shadow 
moved. The voice was a woman’s voice, sharp and terse, 
that ripped the silence as if it had been calico. 

“It’s me,” said Oswald. 

“Who’s me?” 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


21 


“Oswald Holmroyd.” 

“Come your ways here,” pronounced the voice, which 
evidently belonged to the ‘Her’ that the maid had spoken 
of, and when Oswald approached the silhouette confront¬ 
ing him: “Now then,” it asked. “What do you want?” 

“Please . . .” he began, and relapsed into the pious 
formula, “ . . . mother sends her compliments and wishes 
to know . . .” With which, realizing the enormity of 
his offence, his powers of articulation failed him. 
. . . “It’s the cab,” he found strength to whisper after 
a pause. 

“Cab? Cabs is all out,” the silhouette informed him, 
which was the silhouette of a middle-aged woman in a 
coarse apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. 
“What time do you want cab for?” 

“To-night,” Oswald urged, with the breathlessness of 
desperation. “At once, please.” 

“Is it for the station?” 

“It’s for the Mansion House.” The message, almost 
irrecoverably lost in the stirring episodes of these recent 
moments, surged back on him with all its pristine force. 
“They’re waiting now.” 

“Who’s waiting?” 

“Mrs. Bankett.” 

“Which Mrs. Bankett?” 

For the life of Oswald could he think which Mrs. 
Bankett, although he had Mrs. Bankett’s own authority 
for saying “the Mrs. Bankett that everybody knows.” 
Instead he relapsed impotently upon the address: No. 
3, St. Lawrence Square. 

“It is on the Slate,” he prompted, with lips of such 
awed politeness that they scarcely moved, and eyes of such 
delicate consideration for her feelings that they dared not 
look. She repeated “Slate?” and reaching out an arm 
beyond the door drew forth the very slate in fact, from a 


22 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


nail in the wall, that she held diagonally towards the in¬ 
visible source of light with one hand and traced a way 
through a labyrinth of figures with the forefinger of the 
other. “Aye!” she said at length. “It’s here, safe 
enough. He’s got it. He’s taken it down. It’ll be all 
right. Maybe he’s there by now. If not I’ll send him 
straight as soon as he comes back. Cabs is busy to¬ 
night.” 

There was a pause. The interview seemed ended. The 
door was closing. It closed. Simultaneously the little 
Oswald was in gloom again. 

His return to the Square coincided with the appari¬ 
tion of a cab—an empty, rattling and resounding cab 
that came up the Hill Street at a gallop, rocked uproari¬ 
ously over the crossing, and bounced up to the house of 
Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew. It was Him. Him 
at last. Oswald’s heart, depressed till now, leaped ex¬ 
ultantly within him. Here were the fruits of his errand. 
The cab grated up to the kerb; the big door opened; co¬ 
agulated light flowed sluggishly from the porch; the 
voice of the maid exclaimed, “You’re a nice one, you are!” 
An injured voice retorted, “I’ve come as fast as I could. 
I couldn’t drive no faster.” There was a stir and bustle 
in the porch; a gleam of shawls and silks; a mixture of 
eager voices; the slamming of a cab door; the slashing of 
a whip, and the cab rolled past the silent Oswald and 
out of the square. The maid watched it from the gate 
till its mist-enveloped shape had turned the corner, 
exchanging words with some invisible figure in the 
porch that Oswald judged to be the Mrs. Bankett that 
everybody knew. Then the clash of the gate was 
succeeded by tripping footsteps and a ruffle of skirts in 
motion. 

A fear stabbed swiftly through the heart of the little 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


23 


Oswald. He turned a supplicating face to the porch, but 
the action came too late. He was left standing by the 
railings. His gentlemanliness had hesitated all too long 
to act or to proclaim itself. Fearful of intruding he had 
taken up his modest station at some few paces from the 
gate, awaiting only the departure of the cab to tender 
once again his twice frustrated message: “Please . . . 
Mother sends her compliments . . . and wishes to 
know . . .” 

It had seemed to him that his presence was amicably 
recognized and admitted. The maid had looked in his di¬ 
rection twice as if she smiled. The little girl appeared 
to include him in the farewell waving of her mittened 
fingers through the window. And now they were all 
gone, the gate and front door closed inexorably against 
him. A lump compounded of impotence and self¬ 
compassion rose up into his throat. Could he dare to 
ring the bell a second time? No, he could not. It was 
impossible. He was too much of a gentleman. He had 
had too good a father. He had been too well brought up. 

All he could do was to stand with his cheeks pressed 
despairingly against the gate, gazing at the porch and 
hoping. . . . Hoping that even now they might remem¬ 
ber him; that even now the door might suddenly fly open, 
that voices might float out into the mist in search of him: 
“Little boy! . . . Little boy!” 

But no such summons stirred the watcher’s heart. 
Much later in the evening—long after the dampness had 
accumulated once more on those portions of the gate 
dried now by little Oswald’s troubled cheek and gloves, 
the maid cried in the kitchen: “Lawks! Yon lad’s 
forgotten all about sausages. A nice thing trusting 
such as him with a message. As like as not he never went 
for cab at all.” 


24 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


5 

Is there anywhere defeat more dreadful than that sus¬ 
tained within the region of one’s heart alone? 

The little Oswald, relinquishing his hold upon the gate 
at last, withdrew from the scene of this inglorious battle, 
humiliated and despondent. How could he justify such 
treacherous capitulation to his own cowardice? Whence 
came this terrible discrepancy between the heroic great¬ 
ness of his thought and the pusillanimity of action? 
For it was useless that courage, from some craven hiding- 
place in his despair, called upon him in a trembling 
voice to be a twelfth-hour gentleman or die, saying: 
“What if the maid servant is angry? Anger hurts no¬ 
body. What if she cries ‘It’s Him!’ Be Him so long as 
Him is a gentleman and raises his hat. Nothing a 
servant says or does can change a gentleman.” 

And though courage, gathering voice and importunity, 
in inverse ratio to its distance from the porch, expostu¬ 
lated with him thus, always his apostate footsteps led 
him (more laggingly as he neared it) in the direction of 
his home. 

It was a house in a long street, and in a dark street 
too, when at last he reached it—though the darkness here 
lent no such dignity to bricks and mortar as it did in 
St. Lawrence Square, or such gloomy horrors as it did 
to Jobling’s Yard. The houses stood in unbroken rank, 
shoulder to shoulder; every door succeeded by a window, 
and every window by a door in turn; each doorstep abut¬ 
ting on the pavement in company with a cast-iron scraper 
and cellar grate. Only at rare intervals did these houses 
present a glimmering of intelligent light towards the 
street. Now and again some door slammed in the dark¬ 
ness here or there, going off like a gun and rattling its 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


25 


own knocker with the force of its concussion, and in¬ 
visible footsteps hurried this way or that—some of which, 
after the briefest journey, terminated curiously without 
a sound, whilst others were extinguished by a distant 
door-slam, similar (but fainter) to that which had 
brought them into being. The door knob that Oswald 
took at last in both his hands to turn protruded from a 
door distinguished superficially by little from its neigh¬ 
bours. But the instant his fingers closed upon it—and 
this evening they did so more tardily and silently than 
usual—a sudden welcoming voice called out his name: a 
voice inflected to interrogation, and yet with a certitude 
that rose above all query. 

“Oswald?” 

With the door-knob in both hands still pressed against 
his bosom he pushed his way into the narrow passage 
beyond. 

“Yes, mother.” 

“Is that you?” 

“Yes, mother.” 

“Come my child! I was growing anxious about you. 
There are so many cabs to-night. Did you take the 
greatest care?” 

“Yes, mother.” 

The voice that thus addressed the little Oswald was 
sweet and musical, but more striking than either of these 
two excellent qualities was its colour of unmistakable 
tenderness. Mother-solicitude so sweetened and suffused 
it that the dark, irradiated by this clear beacon of a voice, 
shed all its lurking terrors in a moment and became se¬ 
rene and harmless. Simultaneously with Oswald’s en¬ 
trance a chink of light, drawn perpendicularly like a 
chalk line from top to bottom of the right-hand passage 
wall, expanded to a vivid oblong, and the owner of the 
voice came into view at the foot of a flight of stairs. 


26 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


One side of her caught the bright illumination, the other 
lay in shadow. Still, her figure presented an effect of 
radiance, being covered with a white overall, whose 
sleeves—like the sleeves of Her who had appeared so 
startlingly to Oswald at Jobling’s—were rolled up 
above the elbows, and both her hands and three parts of 
each forearm were floury white. But these were very 
different arms, and this was a very different voice, and 
the look that accosted Oswald was a very different look. 
It fell upon him anxiously at first, seizing on every part 
of him to make sure he was, in truth, her very son, un¬ 
altered and unhurt, and melting over him thereafter in 
a visual embrace of fondest reassurance. She could not 
embrace him with her arms, for all she showed desire to 
do so, but she held these out for his admission and he 
walked passively within their bay to receive upon his 
uplifted face the fervent mother-kiss betraying the 
gratification of a hunger long denied. The expression 
of her countenance when it stooped to him, and of her 
voice when—the kiss bestowed—it said “My boy!” were 
curiously blended of love, compassion and exultant pride, 
as if with him pressed defensively to her bosom she flung 
a challenge to the world whose dangers he had so lately 
braved. Before such manifestation of unbounded love 
the recipient’s eyes sank guiltily beneath the weight of 
their unworthiness; his lips quivered and forgot their 
function for very shame, until those other lips reminded 
them: “. . . Aren’t you going to kiss your mother, 
Oswald?” Yes ... he was going to kiss her. He 
kissed her, in fact, laying his chilly mouth against her 
cheek. She noted the inertness of the lips, and withdrew 
from the caress, crying he must be cold and tired after his 
long round, and how thoughtless of her to keep him stand¬ 
ing in the passage when there was such a warm and lovely 
fire awaiting him inside. With which, solicitously guid- 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


27 


ing him with her arms, she pressed her son towards the 
open door from which she had emerged, that led—as it 
appeared—into the kitchen. In the brightly polished 
range a red and glowing fire lent its aid to the single 
naked gas-jet, that might have shed a cheerless ineffectual 
light but for the blazing co-operation of the coals. On 
the scoured deal table beneath the gas pendant stood a 
glazed pancheon containing paste, which, together with 
a paste-board, a large tin flour-dredger, a rolling pin, 
a bowl of water, half a dozen round baking tins or more, 
of different sizes, carefully lined with greased paper, and 
other culinary implements, sufficiently explained the state 
of Mrs. Holmroyd’s wrists and the work on which she 
was engaged. 

Under other circumstances and in other hands this 
kitchen might, perhaps, have worn a bare and hardened 
look, for there was but little furniture in it, and that of 
the simplest kind. Its walls were colour-washed a 
cleanly buff; a buff blind hung before its solitary window; 
some cheap wooden chairs and a square of crimson-edged 
fibre matting beneath the central table, reinforced with 
two or three grocers’ coloured almanacs and a row of 
polished spice canisters on the mantelpiece practically 
completed its equipment. The part-opened door of a 
painted cupboard afforded a glimpse of crockery and 
familiar blue sugar bags. Another door beyond this 
led down into a tiny scullery. 

But the cheerful conjunction of lights and the spotless 
cleanliness of every object revealed by them, and beyond 
all the presence of Oswald’s mother, transmuted these 
bare walls and meagre furniture into an expression of a 
something greater than themselves. This kitchen, one 
might affirm, possessed a soul; a countenance of almost 
human kindliness, that loveless labours had not soiled or 
soured; a voice capable of uttering—to the little Oswald 


28 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


at least—the dear word “Home.” As he unwrapped 
the woollen muffler from his neck, his glance instinctively 
went the round of all the empty chairs as though in quest 
of some expected presence. The action, slight though 
it was, did not escape his mother’s eye. She answered 
the silent question that it asked: 

“Beryl has gone to bed,” she told him. “I think she 
must be asleep.” 

As though in contradiction to the statement a far¬ 
away and childish voice cried “Mother” with long-drawn 
breath, “Has Oswald come back?” Oswald answered for 
himself: “I’m here, Beryl!” The far-away voice re¬ 
turned : “Come here, Oswald. I want to say good¬ 
night.” In Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes a look of sadness 
crept. “Poor Beryl! I had been hoping she was 
asleep. Don’t . . . don’t say anything to disturb her, 
Oswald. She cried after you were gone to-night. Try 
and help her to forget it.” 

The call, mournfully protracted, floated down to them 
again. 

“Oswald.” 

Leaving the comfortable brightness of the kitchen 
Oswald mounted the narrow stairs. On the landing his 
name was vocalized again, more softly this time, for the 
listener had heard and counted every footstep so firmly 
planted to establish and sustain his courage, and knew 
him near at hand. 

“Oswald.” 

He passed into the bedroom through the door left 
partly open for the reduction of loneliness and for free 
communication with the maternal vigilance below, and 
made his way to the little brass-railed bed, beyond the 
defensive bigger bed, from which the voice had emanated. 
There he stretched out his arms in the darkness to where 
two smaller, softer, warmer outspread arms awaited 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


29 


them. At the first contact the head of the Sausage-Boy 
was drawn down almost fiercely into the dark shelter of 
a tiny bosom in which a tiny heart was throbbing fast. 
The arms encompassing his neck closed upon it with the 
energy of despair. His face was kissed persistently with 
lips that emitted breaths of curious hotness, and though 
within the depths of this embrace all was pitchy dark 
and Oswald had his eyes closed for sufferance of his sis¬ 
ter’s caresses—his lips reciprocating kissing sounds for 
every kiss bestowed upon him—he knew the kisses were 
but a substitute for tears, and his name at each reutter¬ 
ance partook more and more of a plaintive and liquid 
character. 

“Did you . . . did you see anything, Oswald?” the 
fervent lips demanded, and the arms made as if to hug 
the information out of him. 

He said evasively: “Some cabs.” 

“Going . . . There?” 

“I think so.” 

There was a sniff. And then: 

“Did you see inside?” 

“Not very well.” 

“Were there any little girls inside?” 

“One or two.” 

“All dressed up?” 

“Yes.” 

“How big were they? As big as me?” 

“Some of them.” 

There was a second sniff. And after awhile a third. 
And Oswald felt the little bosom shake and quiver like 
a boiled pudding in its pan. He said, “Never mind, 
Beryl. Don’t cry!” But there was a something harden¬ 
ing in his own throat too, and behind his eyes was the 
sting of fire. “To-morrow we will go with mother to the 
market.” Something hot and liquid, like a bead of mol- 


30 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ten lead, escaped from his constricted eyelids and fell 
into the fevered bosom below. The sniffs stopped 
abruptly, and after an intent silence the treble voice, 
instinct with a new alertness, enquired: 

“What’s that?” 

“I don’t know.” 

A hot hand, leaving its place behind his neck, groped 
over his cheeks and explored his eyes. 

“You’re crying too I” the voice charged him, with a 
satisfaction almost jubilant. “0, Oswald!” 

The lump in his throat, growing bigger and more per¬ 
sistent, allowed him to make no denial. Melted by each 
other’s tears the Sausage Boy and his sister sniffed with¬ 
out dissimulation, savouring the ecstatic sadness of a 
sorrow shared. 


6 

It was a Friday, and Friday for the little Oswald took 
on the character of a very arduous day. It was a day, 
indeed, on which the work of trying to be a gentleman 
attained its weekly maximum. For two hours, or nearly, 
he had been traversing the streets of Daneborough, en¬ 
grossed in the changeless yet ever changeful problem of 
how a gentleman should deal with knockers or ring bells 
too high for him—an anxious task calling for the nicest 
discrimination and skill. And all this, supplemented by 
his extra journey to the livery stables, and the tears shed 
over his sister’s nightdress, did not conclude his labours 
for the day. There still remained a further errand to 
perform—and that quickly, for the hands of the clock 
were moving menacefully to the hour of eight, and at 
eight o’clock Oswald (as a fully accredited chorister) 
was due to attend the weekly choir practice in the chan¬ 
cel of St. Saviour’s church. 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


31 


The flour had disappeared from Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
hands when Oswald descended to the kitchen, and a 
capacious wicker basket stood upon the scoured deal 
table, which Mrs. Holmroyd was lining with a clean white 
napkin as he entered. She smoothed the creases of the 
folded cloth, replaced the slotted lid over the wicker 
handle and slid the handle over the arm that Oswald 
silently extended. That done, she took the woollen 
muffler from its place of airing on the fender; held it— 
first this side and then that—to the ruddy cheek of the 
fire, and testing its preparedness with a critical hand, 
enwrapped it once again round Oswald’s neck, tucking 
its fringed ends punctiliously beneath his jacket as before. 

Whereupon, encouraged with an enquiring “Well, 
dear?” Oswald began his familiar Friday night’s re¬ 
cital—that custom had crystallized into a formula al¬ 
most as invariable as the polite “Please . . . Mother 
sends her compliments” with which he presented the 
weekly message on her behalf. Mrs. Dunster was obliged 
and would take a large porkpie but no sausages. Mrs. 
Lockford was obliged and would be glad to have a 
medium pie this week and a pound of sausages. Mrs. 
Hibbert was obliged, and they were getting tired of pork, 
but Oswald might call next Friday. Mrs. Fletcher was 
obliged . . . 

The recital proceeded; the list of orders slowly grew. 
Only one eighteenpenny pie stood now between Oswald 
and Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew. He drew his 
breath and his colour deepened. The fateful name was 
raised at last. Mrs. Bankett . . . whom everybody 
knew . . . 

Mrs. Bankett had ordered no pork pie. No sau¬ 
sages. Only a cab. His words hurried now with his 
admission as if they had been legs. “I ran to fetch it 
for them. When I got back it drove away. They went 


32 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


inside and shut the door. I waited for some time. . . . 
They never came to the door again. ... I came home.” 

His mother said “Without the money?” and gazed at 
him with a tragic and incredulous eye. 

Without the money? Aye! Now he came to think 
of it, he had clean forgotten that. He had clean for¬ 
gotten the payment for last week’s order that was to be 
relegated to this; the four and sixpence of such terrific 
consequence to the mother of a son studying hard to be 
a gentleman. The taste of the bitterness of failure came 
back again into his mouth like gall. He had defiled his 
mother’s trust in him. Her confidence in his ability had 
been betrayed. . . . 

She did not upbraid him as other mothers might have 
done. Too well she knew the bitter testament of the hu¬ 
man heart—her own, and through her own, her son’s 
who was a living part of her and whose pains and suffer¬ 
ings she shared. She put her hand upon his shrinking 
shoulder and drew away the coat sleeve (with the wicker 
basket on it) lifted to his eyes as though to shield con¬ 
trition from the sight of sorrow his cowardice had caused. 
“Never mind, Oswald. Never mind, dear. Mother is 
not angry with you. She is proud of you. You have 
done wonders. Mother can manage. . . . She can man¬ 
age very well.” 

He had done wonders. Mother could manage very 
well. But for all that it was a dubious eye that peered 
into the flabby crevices of mother’s purse, eliciting at 
last with finest use of forefinger and thumb some incon¬ 
spicuous silver and three coppers. Three and nine- 
pence in all. 

Three and ninepence was very little for the work in 
hand, but it afforded the repentant Oswald an opportu¬ 
nity unparalleled to be a gentleman in earnest. Here 
was a chance indeed. With his three and ninepence in 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


33 


his tight right hand and this basket on his arm he could 
go firmly to the pork butcher’s ... to the pork 
butcher’s and say: 

“Please, Mr. Waxford. Mother sends her compli¬ 
ments, and she wants just the same as she had last week. 
And here is three and ninepence . . .” 

“• • • Three and ninepence . . .” Mother and son 
were looking fixedly into each other’s eyes by now, as Os¬ 
wald’s lips repeated—or at least re-shaped—the words 
that issued from her. “. . . And ninepence. And if you 
please I will bring the rest of the money in the morning. 
Mother is rather short of change.” 

Could he remember this message? He could. Could 
he repeat it? He could and did, in a chill and con¬ 
scientious undertone animated by no more expression 
than a leg of mutton freshly drawn from cold store. The 
coinage so recently collected with such care and dubiously 
looked at was softly pressed into his unresisting hand. 
The cap was placed upon his head. Mother was short 
of change. It would be quite all right. Mr. Waxford 
would understand. 

Ah! this sad profession of trying to be a gentleman, 
that difficilizes every act of life and makes cowardice so 
dreadful. Not even to his mother dared this quaking 
paladin confess the mockery of his valour. He assumed 
the insignia of her misplaced confidence in him and went 
out, wondrously, into the mist once more. 

This time he performed his errand with a curious sense 
of detachment, speculating impersonally as to the fate 
of it. His visit to the livery stables and his defeat at 
Mrs. Bankett’s had broken his nerve. The vow that his 
craven courage tried to register and animate was but a 
feeble lifeless thing, the mere skimmed milk of resolution, 
all its strength and goodness lacking. He held his 
mother’s love and trust on false pretences. And if any- 


34 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


thing were needed to convince despondency of its un¬ 
worthiness it was the sight of Waxford’s shop. What 
brilliance! What publicity! What merciless exposure 
of shrinking purpose and deceptive ends were here. 

7 

Think of a row of close serried naked gas-burners, 
twelve to the foot at least; all stertorously puffing out 
their bluey yellow flames into the night over a double 
front of plate-glass windows divided by a shop door, the 
slightest waft of air serving to enrage them and rouse 
them to a roar. Now they go blue, to the point of ex¬ 
tinction, like a mendicant’s lips in winter. Now a glis- 
sando ripple runs up and down their extended gamut. 
Now the entire row bursts out into the exuberance of 
irrepressible activity; a seething, hissing line of flame 
that seems to set the whole shop front in motion and 
galvanizes all its white and pendent carcasses into a 
lurid danse macabre. There must have been a dozen 
porcine corpses suspended from the bright steel hooks 
along the glazed shop wall within; their heads down¬ 
ward ; their countenances fixed in a ghastly stereotyped, 
sardonic risus; their nostrils dripping red blood into the 
sawdust heaped below each muzzle, as they awaited their 
momentous metamorphosis into modes of human life. 
Freed from the sin, the sloth, the gluttony of their purely 
animal existence they would turn to all sorts of things. 
The loins of this one might be translated into love; the 
ribs of that other might reappear on Sunday trans¬ 
figured as a sermon, denouncing vice and propagating 
dogma. To-day they were but pork; to-morrow they 
would put on humanity, assume the substance of man¬ 
kind, become incorporate partners in man’s very soul; 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


35 


fortifiers of his faith; heritors, with him, of his glorious 
immortality. 

To the little Oswald, attached with conscientious 
might and main to three and ninepence and the wicker 
basket, this spectacle of twelve impassive corpses—all of 
one size, all of one semblance, all reduced to a grizzled 
uniformity in death, their once voracious stomachs cleft 
and emptily outspread for public edification as if they 
preached a sermon protestive of the vanity of all things 
earthly—impressed his susceptibilities less than the gas- 
blanched mortuary in which they hung. More terrible 
than these twelve impassive blood-sealed jurors to him 
were the roaring lights without, that seemed to hiss and 
mock his courage; the pallid opal globes within, blazon¬ 
ing in sable capitals the name of Waxford. The callous 
ostentation of the shop dismayed him with its gleaming 
scales of brass and marble; its hooks and implements of 
spotless steel; its chopping-block of scoured and scalded 
cleanliness; its sawdust sprinkled floor, and last and 
dreadfullest of all—its proprietor’s obese and proper 
person, arrayed in Friday’s immaculate white vestments, 
unstained as yet by grease or gore; the starched and 
snowy tunic protracted by the not less snowy apron 
which—drawn tightly round his nether quarters—made 
no appreciable indentation on his noble convexity. By 
some process of assimilation as yet imperfectly under¬ 
stood by scientists or theologians, much intimacy and 
close association with the world of pork had brought the 
rotund Waxford into striking physical conformity with 
what he dealt in. His eyes, deep sunk within their fleshy 
orbits, presented a glazed and porcine stare; his ears 
were large and hispid; his flesh possessed a bleached and 
waxen character curiously akin to that of the twelve 
inverted apostles lining his white-tiled wall. Slung up 


36 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


by his heels to the steel rod, with his head and forepaws 
to the floor, and his internal economy spread open to 
inspection on a cambrel, he might have cut no despicable 
figure in competition with the carcasses displayed to-night. 
As he stood, filling the shop door with his bulk, one hand 
immersed in the spacious pocket of his apron, where it 
toyed indolently with a copious provision of loose change, 
he was a form to strike dismay into the heart of three 
and ninepence. Three and ninepence, indeed, asked itself 
fearfully where the courage requisite to disturb that 
breadth of abdomen was coming from, and had not yet 
received its answer from heaven when the Waxford gaze, 
proprietorially roaming over the area of public roadway 
annexed from darkness by his blazing burners to form 
an extension of his business, fell at last upon the wicker 
basket on the irresolute right arm and lay there with 
such a substantial weight of look as almost to bow the 
basket down. The eye—that small, sagacious, active 
eye—recognized the Holmroyd basket in a trice, and 
read the meaning of that tightly folded hand. Out of 
the creases in his voluminous neck emerged a voice: 
peremptory, decisive. 

“Now my lad!” it said, and without dissimulation my 
lad stepped forth. Who was three and ninepence to 
withstand a summons such as this. 

Three and ninepence, turning itself over and over along 
with Mother’s compliments, all in a tropical and coppery 
sweat, followed the surpliced proprietor into his place of 
business (that only by default of a few water-sprays and 
some chloride of lime fell short of being a morgue) where 
the Waxford assistant industriously rotated the handle 
of a galvanized iron mincing machine. 

“Please . . . Mother sends her compliments . . . and 
she wants . . . just the same ... as she had last 
week . . .” 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


37 


The message broke off abruptly as if by its own weight. 
Three and ninepence awaited horror-struck for an 
amendment that never came! Even the gas-globes 
blinked increduously and rolled protesting eyes; the as¬ 
sistant applied himself blindly to the galvanized iron 
mincer as if staggered and appalled. Only Waxford 
made no sign. Only Waxford preserved his imperturba¬ 
bility, saying he knew what Mrs. Holmroyd wanted well 
enough. “Give us hold of your basket, boy.” 

In the most appalling silence, unbroken by a word, 
three and ninepence saw the awful activities precipitated 
by its rash pronouncement. Knives were sharpened with 
a clash and gleam of deadly steel; glittering choppers 
rose and fell; the brass and marble scales oscillated with 
tremulous irresolution before Waxford’s judicial eye. 
Something was swept from the liberated balance and in¬ 
humed by Waxford’s busy fingers in Oswald’s basket. 
The white cloth was wrapped like a winding sheet about 
these committed remains, the lid was replaced. 

“There, my lad!” said Waxford at the conclusion of 
this brief but impressive ceremony. “That’s a bit of 
lovely stuff, tell your mother. She won’t beat it any¬ 
where in this town. Seven and elevenpence.” A white 
and puffy palm, gleaming with the grease of its recent 
labours grew forthwith to gigantic proportions and 
eclipsed the basket beneath Oswald’s gaze. Chink, 
chink, chink, chink. Coin by coin three and ninepence 
took laborious leave of its temporary owner and passed 
into the extended palm that would have made half a 
dozen three and ninepences look puny. 

“Three and six,” (the voice of Waxford continued) 
“and seven . . . Three and eight. And one’s nine.” 
He gave the coinage a shake as if to jog the payer’s 
memory and expedite completion. “Three and nine, my 
lad. And seven and eleven the skins and pork.—Is that 


38 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


all you’ve brought with you?” For the Sausage Boy had 
raised a quick imploring face to the face above him, and 
relapsed upon an abject “yes” that all his members ut¬ 
tered rather than his lips. 

With a man of less experience and resource than Wax- 
ford who knows how long they might have preserved their 
two respective attitudes: this one with averted eyes: that 
one with inverted hand? Nay, given but another minute 
who shall say that the thought so fruitlessly beating 
against the closed walls of Oswald’s brain might not have 
been heroically rescued by his tongue at last? But the 
individual confronting him was unfettered by any futile 
gentlemanly feelings—as the prosperity of his business 
and the twelve apostles testified. All these legs and sides 
of pork, these spiral stacks of vermilion poloneys, these 
bloated blood puddings and basins of glutinous brawn, 
these strings of anaemic sausages, these trays of scraped 
ears and translucent trotters, these bladders of lard— 
bald and resplendent as the dome of Waxford’s head— 
had not been assembled with such profusion in this place 
by qualities of sentiment and diffidence. Their owner, 
clapped the three and ninepence on the counter beside 
the glittering scales and said: “You’re short, my 
lad. You’d best run home and fetch the rest. Seven 
and elevenpence tell your mother, and you’ve brought 
me three and nine. You needn’t bother to take 
the basket. I’ll take care of it for you till you come 
back.” 

The order, uttered without the least heat, brooked no 
contention. It was a plain precept according to the 
first principles of sound business. Three and ninepence 
—that was not three and ninepence any longer, but only 
heartache wrapped up in a muffler—stood confounded 
for one moment. The next it stole silently from the shop. 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


39 


8 

Again Oswald took hold of the familiar doorknob with 
both his hands and turned it beneath the pressure of an 
overburdened bosom. Again he let himself into the nar¬ 
row passage with the chink of light drawn like a chalk¬ 
line down the right hand wall. Again he was greeted by 
name; the chalk line widened to a rectangle of light; his 
mother, once more floury of forearm, came out into the 
passage to welcome him. Her voice and her insufferable 
tender smile—falling on a bosom charged with sorrow to 
its brim—made grief overflow. Without a word, without 
a look, he passed into the kitchen; chose the far-most 
chair; turned his face to the wall, with his arm laid on 
the chair back and his nose buried in his coat sleeve, and 
wept inconsolably. 

It had come at last, this horrible exposure. Fruit¬ 
lessly he had battled with it, fought against it, seeing the 
inevitable evil draw nearer week by week. Now the doom 
had fallen; he sat disgraced. He had wronged most 
wickedly his mother’s love. She knew; she knew. Her 
smile had been a sword of flame, plunged hilt-deep in the 
bowels of his delinquency. Every object in the house 
knew his disgrace and scorned him. The Swiss clock 
ticking on the mantelpiece withdrew its voice severely as 
though it ticked no longer for unworthy Oswalds and 
kept no time for those who put time to so little profit. 
The chair he sat on offered contrition an uncomfortable 
seat. The sharp edge of its rail cut into the arm re¬ 
posing on it; the wall repulsed his forehead for all the 
world as if it cried: “Away! I will have no concern 
with cowards.” He was disgraced, disowned, deserted. 
And woefully he wept. 


40 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


At first the suasive softness of his mother’s voice, the 
tender supplication of her arms, inspired but a more 
obstinate refusal of the lips to put their cause for weep¬ 
ing into words or let the rim of comfort’s proffered cup 
come near them. 

But little by little, by monosyllables at a time, trouble 
was fished up from her watery depths, and Mrs. Holm- 
royd learned the truth of all these tears. They stirred 
remorse, not anger. Her mother’s heart, smitten 
through this comprehensible sorrow of her son’s, turned 
swiftly on itself. The fault was hers, not his. She had 
been heedless of his years. The tasks imposed on him 
were all too heavy for such slender shoulders; too heavy 
on occasions for her own. Her conscience, self accused, 
confessed a cowardice more culpable than his; a coward¬ 
ice that went disguised too frequently as love, concealed 
behind the subterfuge of kisses, professing pride and 
trust in him—that all the while were but tricks to trade 
upon affection and rouse in his small breast the courage 
lacking in her own. Had she ignored the spectre over¬ 
shadowing this evening’s errand? Did she not see, com¬ 
mitting to his hand the dreadful three and ninepence and 
to his lips the still more dreadful message, her own dis¬ 
may reflected out of Oswald’s eyes? Was it fair to 
make her son the agent of commissions such as these be¬ 
cause his guilelessness lacked lips to confess fear and 
owned but eyes, beseeching to be read? 

Save for a cruel providence his feet were never meant 
to run the gutters. He was no errand boy (protesting 
conscience told her) unhampered by pride and unde¬ 
terred by truth; no common runner of the roads to whom 
all streets were home; no blushless ringer of bells and 
hardened rapper of knockers. He was his father’s son 
condemned to tasks for which his gentleness was never 
fitted. The arms she wound about his neck were con- 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


41 


trite arms. The tears she spilled were tears of impotence 
and pity, to think her love could help so little. Surely 
an all-wise, merciful and loving 1 Father might in His wis¬ 
dom have devised some better means to manifest His care 
of her and hers. Sorrow may be, as pietists allege, the 
soul’s true sustenance, by feeding upon which it groweth 
godlike. But sorrow too—as well she was aware— 
can be a mean and pettifogging thing; a blister on the 
heel of aspiration that, for all its paltriness, causes the 
noblest aim to limp. To sustain a spacious sorrow is 
heroic; to resist some great temptation may be noble; 
but daily to adjust small means to little ends teaches the 
soul to stoop. The tallest stature may be lowered at 
last, and lofty thoughts lose their uprightness that are 
daily subject to mean necessities. Like the constant 
threading of fine needles the spiritual eyesight compelled 
to read life’s petty print too closely loses its larger 
vision and risks becoming blind to God. 

All this and more moved in the mind of Oswald’s mother 
as she clasped her son. But grief is a quality hopelessly 
unpractical. Grief is for the opulent and leisured, who 
have the time for its indulgence and the wealth to buy 
for it the luxuries it needs. Combat with a selfish world 
(she feared) had made this mother very practical. 
Sometimes so sadly practical that she must weep in 
privacy to think how changed she was. She thought now 
of the absent basket and resolutely dried her eyes. 

The dreadful practical part of her worked out a 
sordid sum in subtraction. Three and nine from seven 
and elevenpence. Nine from eleven, two; three from 
seven, four. Four shillings and twopence. Four shil¬ 
lings and twopence she needed. Oswald’s eyes were 
fixed upon her now; she would avenge his tears and re¬ 
instate his honour, cost what it might. Decisively she 
doffed her overall, drew down her sleeves, assumed her 


42 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


hat and mantle, and—first commending the house to 
Oswald’s sacred care—went out into the November 
mist. 

The clock struck eight. At the Mansion House those 
chosen children would be joyful. In the chancel of St. 
Saviour’s (prodigious and appalling thought) the choir 
practice had begun. On Waxford’s counter the interned 
pork slept dreamlessly in its cotton shroud, unexpectant 
and unperturbed. 


9 

The resolution displayed by Oswald’s mother had not 
a lengthy journey to sustain. No lengthier, indeed, 
than to the next door—whither she betook herself with a 
firm step and a courage that the night air had not time 
to cool. Whatever may be, in other ways, alleged 
against it, the darkness is friendly to errands such as 
this. Under night’s indulgent mantle neighbourly bor¬ 
rowing loses much of its terror; although as an offset to 
this advantage, we must remember that it is not less easy 
to refuse a favour than to ask one, in the dark. And for 
all Mrs. Holmroyd’s confidence, she poised her uplifted 
knuckles with something more than deliberation before 
the panels of the next door, rehearsing her summons 
once or twice, with the nicest assessment of force neces¬ 
sary, before the fingers fell. 

The summons that ensued betrayed her. At a crisis, 
it seemed, she was no surer than her son. The knock 
confessed itself the furtive suppliant’s knock; the in- 
gratiatory knuckle-usage of one with a favour to ask. 
The bearer of a benefit, the repayer of a loan, the bringer 
of good tidings, rap resolutely, joyously. The act is 
confident and free, not furtive and repressed, burdened 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


43 


with the fear of knocking too loud lest it raise expecta¬ 
tion over high within. 

Oswald had rapped three times at Jobling’s. His 
mother rapped as many here before her summons reached 
the remote and dormant consciousness of the house. 
Slippered footsteps trod untidily towards the door, 
guided in the darkness by hands that slid along alternate 
walls. Her eyes, now capable of differentiating the de¬ 
grees of darkness, knew when the door opened by reason 
of the deeper dark beyond—for all it opened very little. 
No wider, indeed, than to make way for a peering and 
suspicious nose that sniffed the outer darkness without 
a sound, as if it had been a rat. Since the nose remained 
motionless and the door betrayed no disposition to open 
wider, Mrs. Holmroyd—with a quickening of the heart 
beneath her mantle—spoke at last. 

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kenway,” she said. 
The voice was soft, and in its polite depression singularly 
like her son’s. 

The nose, under this assurance, grew to half a fore¬ 
head and one eye. 

“What! Is that you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” And receiv¬ 
ing Mrs. Holmroyd’s answer that it was, became a whole 
head and part of a bosom, whilst the voice—casting its 
uncertainty aside—assumed a geniality almost dreadful 
to the soul of a borrower. Its note of welcome pitched 
a major key too high; a tone too bold for borrowing to 
sustain. Skilful modulation would be necessary to lead 
the theme, yet undeclared, into the confidential minor. 
“Why, bless me’m!” cried the head and bosom. “I made 
sure I couldn’t mistake your voice, Mrs. Holmroyd. 
Step your ways in, marm.” The invitation, loudly ten¬ 
dered, that accompanied the flinging open of the door— 
as though the earlier suspicion renounced all further need 


44 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to exercise itself—struck courage in the face. Courage, 
dismayed by such utter confidence reposed in it, shrank 
hurriedly from an invitation so compromising to pur¬ 
pose. 

“I only just called, Mrs. Kenway . . .” 

“Come in, marm; come in!” the voice repeated. “You’re 
very welcome. There’s no need to apologize I’m sure. 
Don’t stand outside in the damp.” 

“Thank you . . . thank you,” Mrs. Holmroyd said. 
“But I didn’t really wish to trouble you. I only just 
called to . . .” 

“You’re not troubling me, Mrs. Holmroyd. I’m not 
to a minute,” urged the insistent voice. “We don’t see 
much of one another, for all we’re such near neighbours. 
I was only saying so to my husband this dinner time. 
Do step forwards, marm.” 

Again courage and politeness strove to escape the 
paralyzing toils of misplaced friendship; begging to be 
excused; alleging household obligations and the need for 
haste. Mrs. Holmroyd had just called. . . . Her little 
boy . . . 

“Aye, to be sure,” the voice agreed, which by its in¬ 
sistent geniality proclaimed that it suspected nothing 
and was animated by no more hopeful motive than friendli¬ 
ness and a love of gossip. “Your little boy’s got back, 
marm. I felt sure I heard your front door shut and you 
calling of him by name a while ago. I thought it must 
be him. Voices sounds quite plain through the passage 
wall. I often hear your little girl call out to you after 
you’ve put her to bed. They’ve not gone to Mayor’s 
Party then. I’ve not been home very long myself. A 
friend of mine’s little son and daughter got an invite, and 
she asked me to go and see them before they went. Real 
bonny they looked. . . . My word! Hasn’t there 
been some cabs! I don’t know what you think about it, 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


45 


Mrs. Holmroyd,” the voluble voice pursued, “but I’ve 
heard a deal of complaints. Why, I know a case myself. 
Seven in a family, and not a single invite. Me and you 
pays rates and taxes same as anybody else, and they don’t 
forget us when it’s gas or water at quarter’s end. But 
let it be parties and My Word! They don’t ask us to 
go to Mansion House and look at childer dancing!” 

The current of her genial indignation swept on. It 
was a strong tide for a mere borrower to stem. Mrs. 
Holmroyd, supporting her bosom with one hand beneath 
her mantle, yielded to the wordy flood, her purpose sub¬ 
merged and foundering, her strength and resolution al¬ 
most spent. Once or twice her courage faltered. In¬ 
vention sought to fabricate some motive for this visit 
more consonant with pride. But such unworthy subter¬ 
fuge would be false to Oswald. Could she, thereafter, 
face her son? It was curious how their two places were 
now reversed; how she feared the clearness of her son’s 
eyes, the judgment of his unspoken reproaches as he had 
feared hers; how she made her duty towards him, his 
confidence in her, the test and mainspring of her present 
conduct. And, blindly breasting the verbal current at 
last, she struck the dreaded shore and delivered her lips 
of the purpose that had embarrassed them so long. Not 
one listener in a thousand, possibly, (and in the dark) 
could have divined what motive force was requisite to 
articulate these polite and gentle words: “I wonder if 
I might venture to trouble you, Mrs. Kenway ... If 
you would be so kind . . .” 

The request, squeezed from her reluctant mouth as if it 
had been blood, drew to its completion. In thought it 
had been dreadful; in speech more dreadful still. Five 
shillings, insinuated thus, seemed almost sinister. Her 
heart recoiled from this creation of her lips. This bas¬ 
tard offspring, fathered by necessity, shamed her. Fur- 


46 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


tive and mean it bespoke its dreadful parentage even in 
the dark. As it left her lips she was shamefully aware 
of a sudden alteration in the stillness. Some door of 
interest, she felt, had been abruptly closed. Where her 
words, before, had sunk into the bosom of a receptive 
geniality they were now repelled as from a sounding- 
board. “I’m sorry, marm” the darkness in the doorway 
said, and there was a subtle alteration in its tone as if the 
damp had chilled it. The voice had quitted its original 
key and was now descended into a key more regretfully 
minor than Mrs. Holmroyd’s own. 

“0, pray . . .” Mrs. Holmroyd quickly begged, 
. . don’t mention it, Mrs. Kenway.” 

“Very sorry, marm,” the darkness repeated, showing 
somewhat less bosom than before. “—Did I understand 
you to say five shillings, Mrs. Holmroyd?” 

The question was asked in a tone that let it be clearly 
understood it owned a motive no more than formally 
polite. 

“It is no matter, Mrs. Kenway,” Oswald’s mother an¬ 
swered. “Yes ... I did mention that amount. It 
would have been a slight convenience. But pray don’t 
trouble. I merely thought . . . Friday is rather an 
awkward night.” 

The figure in the dark agreed with hearty compliance 
that Friday was an awkward night. Everybody (she re¬ 
flected) found the same. She was very sorry indeed, 
marm. But her husband not being at home just then, 
and her having to do a bit of shopping shortly, you 
see. . . . Why! There. Mrs. Holmroyd would know 
how it was. 

Mrs. Holmroyd knew thoroughly how it was. Knew 
too well how it was. 

“Otherwise . . .” the voice suggested, throwing open a 
vague doorway to the possibilities. Mrs. Holmroyd con- 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


47 


cur red with a rapid “To be sure ... to be sure. Please 
forgive me for having troubled you. I only thought . . . 
It is really of no consequence. How damp it is to-night.” 

It really did not matter. It was of no consequence. 
The three and ninepence by Waxford’s scales, the basket 
on his counter, the sausage and pork pies ordered, as 
yet all unbegun, her little Oswald keeping vigil on the 
kitchen chair—they did not matter. They were of no 
consequence. 

Despite her growing practical-mindedness so fre¬ 
quently deplored, she was, at base, no bolder than her boy. 

10 

She let herself into her home with a due regard for the 
neighbourly vigilance, immuring herself not so noiselessly 
as to betray to these tell-tale walls a purpose defeated or 
a conscience shamed. For a moment after entry she 
stood, preserving the attitude of an anxious and expect¬ 
ant listener. But no voice acknowledged her return. 
Within was silence, so nicely graduated to her ear that 
it seemed almost deathly. Strange terrors take their 
toll of true maternal hearts. She tore the veil of silence 
urgently aside as if it were a sheet that draped some shape 
indefinite and dreadful, saying: 

“Oswald!” 

“Yes, mother.” 

At that she drew breath of reassurance again. Thank¬ 
fulness returned with courage, in a tide. Her joy to 
find him safe was almost great enough to sweep away the 
memory of her recent ordeal. She advanced with an ex¬ 
ultant confidence begotten of her son’s voice. At least 
she had Him. Him, and that other—not less dear— 
above. Within these walls was happiness indeed; a hap¬ 
piness made all the brighter by the darkness of the world 


48 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


without; a treasure that her soul guarded the more zeal¬ 
ously because she knew it assailed. 

Oswald sat where she had left him, on the wooden chair, 
before all this paraphernalia for the interrupted manu¬ 
facture of pies. Traces of beknuckled tears still gleamed 
on his cheek-bones, but he had exchanged the attitude of 
despair for one of speculation, and his countenance ex¬ 
pressed enquiry more than grief. 

His mother entered the kitchen with a smile he had 
known before—though its precise significance he did not 
understand—the smile wrung out of adversity that, but 
for her children, might have been tears all told. 

“Did Beryl call out to you whilst I was away, Os¬ 
wald?” 

“No mother.” 

“I want you to take care of the house for mother a 
little longer, Oswald.” 

She noted his eyes’ quick reference to the clock, and 
her glance faltered as his own had done. “Ten minutes 
past eight already! I had no idea. You will be late for 
the choir practice, Oswald.” 

Late for the practice? Did his mother really mean to 
impose this further burden upon his unequal shoulders? 
She saw the courage die out of his face like an extin¬ 
guished taper, and added hastily: “But to-night you 
cannot go. Mother cannot spare you, Oswald.” She 
made pretence to appeal to his magnanimity. “You 
will not mind for once, will you dear? It is for mother's 
sake.” 

He sniffed, touched to the very depths of his ardent 
hypocrisies by the appeal. O! what a hypocrite he was. 
O! what a hypocrite he knew himself to be. 

When Mrs. Holmroyd accosted the November mist once 
more she bore beneath her mantle something of whose 
identity her son knew nothing, though his eye was vaguely 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


49 


conscious of its presence. He was aware she held some 
object of a just perceptible bulk against her bosom, for 
she had but one hand to lay upon his neck in going. And 
whatever the hidden bulk might be—not that his curi¬ 
osity was sensibly stirred, for he was still at the age that 
reposes its implicit faith in a mother’s wisdom and good¬ 
ness—the object had small significance, for she told him 
as his eye rested on it: “It is nothing, Oswald. Mother 
will be back soon.” 

Always before to-night, in the times of stress, (and 
for Oswald’s mother such times had not been lacking) 
she had registered and had kept her vow, that to this 
dire remedy she should never have recourse, fearful lest 
its specious efficacy might enslave her to the habit and 
lead her into evils deeper than those from which she 
sought relief. Crises as acute as this she had surmounted 
before, but the citadel does not always fall to the fiercest 
onslaught. It falls as frequently to some half-hearted 
after-sally, when the powers of resistance are at ebb. 

Much the same way she took as that which Oswald had 
taken earlier, when his uncertain footsteps led him to 
Waxford’s shop. But before Waxford’s flaring frontage 
could challenge purpose or arrest courage she turned 
down one of the shorter side streets into a region where 
all the streets (or so it seemed) were side-streets—short 
and mean and lightless—and came to a halt at last before 
the gable of a small and questionable shop. 

The shop was a corner shop, its door sunk in the angle 
of adjoining walls that made a salient eave above it. On 
either side, one in this street and one in that, two shabby 
submerged windows let out a shabby light. The door be¬ 
tween them, whose upper half was rectangled into six panes 
of dirty glass, let out light of the same shabby quality, 
from the same shabby source, that a peep above the red 
curtains draping its lower panes showed to be an oil- 


50 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


lamp suspended from a darkened beam. From the ceiling 
of which this beam formed part there hung a host of 
things more sombre than the lamp. Garments they 
seemed to be: dingy overcoats and skirts, and boots and 
shoes in clusters, like the corpses of apparel that had 
made away with themselves. From the shop floor 
stacks of other lifeless clothing rose to meet them. The 
windows, too, were cumbered with the ghastly company 
of apparel; the very putting-off of extremity and despair, 
yet offered still again to clad the limbs of living wretched¬ 
ness and lend chill warmth to miserable blood. Well 
might the spectacle of such a shop send a shiver down 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s spine. This way was never meant for 
her. O! never, never meant for her. To cross such a 
threshold was to forfeit something of the cherished pur¬ 
ity of a soul; to touch contamination; to part with some¬ 
what of that principle which keeps life sweet and con¬ 
science clean. 

She looked this way. She looked that. God knew it 
was no crime she contemplated; only an act of sacrifice. 
She laid her hand impulsively upon the brazen door- 
latch, worn bright by the application of many fingers, 
and chose her moment for the fateful Now. 

11 

Relieved of that incriminating burden borne beneath 
her mantle—which when unwrapped at length, declared 
itself to be a silver creamjug—the mother of Oswald 
emerged from this degraded place of dreadful barterings. 
Whilst she had stood without, all terror seemed resident 
within. Now, hesitating on the threshold of external 
darkness, all terror seemed without. Not till she had 
spurned the poisonous latch like an infected hand and 
flung herself into the bosom of the mist deep beyond every 


THE SAUSAGE BOY 


51 


contact with the tainted yellow light, did reassurance re¬ 
turn. With each step taken pride repossessed itself; she 
regained control of her breathing; dared at last to raise 
her head. 

The roaring gas-jets, all flickering up and down the 
garish Waxford frontage, occasioned her no tremor. 
Her chin rose defiantly before the blast of flame. Tem¬ 
pered in that fiercer forge, her courage faced such fires 
as these undaunted. How had this vulgar creature dared 
to take advantage of her son! 

By this time public interest had begun to respond to 
the animated blowing of these pursed and fiery lips. The 
greasy cleaver had chopped its way as far as the third 
apostle, and it was rising and falling with remorseless 
energy before the eyes of an attentive audience when Mrs. 
Holmroyd entered the shop. The sight of Waxford 
added to her stature, and lent a further assertiveness to 
her chin. Some guilty premonition passed through his 
frame as she approached and paralyzed his fleshy arm, 
for with the cleaver already raised the purpose in his 
hardened muscles faltered all at once and failed. The 
chopper descended harmlessly upon the block, and the 
hand that held it was swift to seize the confiscated basket. 
The gesture interpreted apology. 

“. . . Your basket, marm.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd acknowledged ownership with dignified 
reserve. At least the offending Waxford had a more dis¬ 
criminating eye than that other before which she had so 
lately quailed. He could distinguish a lady from mere 
womankind, even though the lady was reduced to come 
upon her own errand at an hour of the night when ladies, 
strictly speaking, were supposed to be at home. The 
tribute of his polite discernment tended to allay her in¬ 
dignation. Perhaps Oswald’s diffidence had been, to some 
extent, at fault. Certainly the porcine Waxford lacked 


52 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


none of the essentials of deference to Oswald’s mother. 
She began, “My little boy . . .” as a prelude to reproof, 
but Waxford’s politeness (not altogether at its ease) in¬ 
sisted on sparing her the trouble of an explanation. “To 
be sure, marm,” he told her, wiping the handle of the 
basket on the corner of his no longer quite spotless apron, 
and cleaning his fingers in turn: all ten of them, for the 
due manipulation of a lady’s change. He quite under¬ 
stood. Her little boy had come without the money, and 
gone away to fetch it before Waxford could stop him, 
leaving the basket behind. He was sorry, marm . . . 
could he send the pork for her? Alfred, take hold of this 
here basket and carry it for this here lady. It would be 
no trouble marm. Just as she pleased, marm. Alfred, 
put the basket down again. The lady prefers to take 
it with her. 

The quarter-jack from St. Gyles’s chimed out the last 
quarter before nine as Mrs. Holmroyd walked hurriedly 
along the moist and sometimes greasy flags. All the 
agony of those recent moments fused, as she walked, into 
a transcendent calm. For once again the sacred home 
was saved. In a life built on such frail foundations and 
compounded of such fragile things, the least shock threat¬ 
ened disaster. And this failure of her weekly output of 
savouries would have thrown all her careful calculations 
out of truth; would have involved her in an endless train 
of embarrassments ridiculous and tragic. 

Now she could return swiftly, joyously to the bosom 
of her family, to taste once more—after such bitter mo¬ 
ments of separation—the true sweetness of home, and 
build up—whilst she baked—fresh dreams of hope and 
liberty for those she loved. 



BOOK II 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


1 


M RS. HOLMROYD had not lived all her life in 
Daneborough. Only the briefest, saddest and 
most tragic part of it. Nor had she, prior 
to this time of sorrow, made and sold pork pies. They 
were a part of her tragedy. 

Less than an interminable year before, this ancient 
town of Daneborough had, to her, been but a name. 
Then one day, weighted by the weeds that proclaimed her 
recent sorrow, she had come to the town with her two 
children, leaving behind the best of husbands and of fathers 
in the crowded church-yard of the cruel city that had 
killed him. 

The city was no crueller than other thriving cities are. 
And it had not killed him. But a fine grief does not stand 
abjectly on fact. It demands a spacious inconsistency 
to move in. To reduce the death of one so dearly loved 
to a natural process of imperfect nature seems like a 
denial of nobility; an utter dereliction of the duties of 
love. Mrs. Holmroyd’s love transfigured her dead hus¬ 
band as a martyr whom, for his very virtues, a cruel city 
slew. He had died defending her and his, his last hours 
embittered only by anxious love for them. 

The truth is, they had probably loved each other over 
well, these two. Their lives had been too deeply inter¬ 
woven ; each grown too dependent on the love and loyalty 
of the other. Marriages less ideal than theirs have this 
advantage at least: they offer a better preparation for 


54 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


widowhood. Union may be strength, but it is at the cost 
of the individual, and to those who have once known the 
blessed liberty of bondage independence is a cribbed and 
cruel thing. Her husband’s memory had been burden 
enough to bear, without those deeper obligations weight¬ 
ing it. For though Oswald Holmroyd discharged in full 
his debt to Nature, Nature was not, alas, the only creditor 
demanding satisfaction. 

Death, even the most exemplary, is no solatium to a 
man’s creditors. Rather does it seem a source of fury 
and annoyance to them that debtors should have liberty 
to die at all. The race of creditors is bigoted and ruthless. 
It recognizes but one virtue in the world: the virtue that 
is solvent. For a man to die without the least hatred of 
those to whom he owes money, for him to forgive all his 
enemies, to take the tenderest leave of wife and family, 
and steal unobtrusively away by life’s back door whilst 
his creditors keep watch upon the front—is to them 
naught. Man’s first duty to his fellow-men (they say) is 
to succeed. Those who hold such exalted views of life 
as to be above making money by methods disagreeable to 
their own pride, should be above owing it. Fine feelings, 
lofty principles, elevated ideals—these things are well 
enough for those who can afford them, but they have got 
to be paid for as surely as suites of furniture and 
Persian rugs. 

They were right. Oswald Holmroyd admitted they 
were right. In the weeks before he died, no creditor could 
have passed more scathing judgment on his conduct than 
himself. He acquired almost a creditor’s clairvoyance 
for seeing facts, who had till then seemed blind to every¬ 
thing but absurd ideals. What justification, indeed, is to 
be found for an architect who looks only at the sublimities 
of his calling, and who maintains the stubbornest re- 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 55 

sistance to adulterate its standard with the mercantile 
dilutions of the age? 

What justification is to be found for an architect who 
will not cry his abilities abroad nor hook fingers through 
the button-holes of mammon, nor conciliate councillors 
nor flatter aldermen nor hob-nob with the jerrybuilder. 
He had had a business and he had lost it, chiefly because 
of inability to reconcile his theories with life. He saw 
how success was to be won, and shirked it, always hoping 
that the principles he held by would prevail. More than 
once, in the bitterness of failure, he told his wife: “The 
time is gone by for architects. Houses are turned out 
by machinery, nowadays. There is no work for me. . . . 
I ought to have been a butcher.” 

The cry was but another plea for his incompetence. 
He would have succeeded no better as a butcher, no better 
as a baker, no better as anything at all in this degenerate 
world that refused to sink to the world’s own level in order 
to draw inglorious profit from it. For there were archi¬ 
tects—architects on every hand around him—who did 
succeed. Though, as he asked himself at times with the 
bitterness that disappointment breeds even in the gentlest 
of us: “But how!” 

How? Ah well! Certainly not by leaving their abil¬ 
ities to a busy age to discover for itself. Not by draw¬ 
ing elevations of imaginary cathedrals during idle hours, 
or working out competitive designs for workhouses and 
public buildings, to be implicitly submitted in accord¬ 
ance with the published terms. 

Perhaps marriage—such a perfect marriage as his had 
been—did not evoke the best in him. This atmosphere 
of love and sympathy might be too enervating for a man 
temperamentally tender. A wife of sterner mould was 
what he needed; a home less dear to him than the one he 
had. And perhaps, too, their dispositions—his and hers 


56 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


—were too unfortunately akin. His faults were her 
faults; his failings her failings; her sympathies and weak¬ 
nesses his. She was too prone to take his side, to justify 
in him what prudence had done wiser to condemn. She 
half suspected it, indeed. The dead weight of a too- 
loving wife (she dared to hint) had handicapped him. 
For her and for his children’s sake he had essayed to do 
too much, to furnish them with comforts and a home be¬ 
yond his means. They should retrench; give up this 
house that had been so dear to both, sink their pride; 
face life afresh on a lower level and with humbler eyes. 
The fateful topic, long imprisoned in their anxious looks, 
was forced to their lips at last. For the first time in his 
wife’s knowledge Oswald Holmroyd buried his head in his 
hands with a dreadful gesture of despair and told her: 
“God forgive me Margaret. We can’t go on like this. 
I am a failure. Help me to face it.” 

Who could have helped him better? Here was the true 
wife for the hour of trouble; the help meet for man. If 
she had once doubted him as he begged to be doubted he 
might (who knows) have suffered his defeat more easily. 
But she never doubted; she never accused. The faith 
that she had in him cut deeper than reproaches. It was 
the world’s fault (she said) not his. But the time would 
come (she pledged her word) . . . the time was coming. 

All too true. The time was coming indeed, more 
quickly than either of them knew. It was not the first 
time that Death had rapped at the door of Oswald Holm- 
royd’s life, and to that earlier summons charity might at¬ 
tribute not unjustly all those latter misfortunes that the 
architect charged against his own disposition, for he 
never regained ground after that first illness. Neither of 
them had been forgetful of the dreadful promissory note 
impending. But they had tried, both, to believe the bill 
of infinite renewal. And because it was not pressed upon 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


57 


their notice with the regularity of those other and earthly 
bills they dared to think at last their creditor indulgent 
or the liability annulled. Death is such an unmethodical 
creditor, to be sure, who, presenting his account for in¬ 
stant settlement and terrifying the wretched client almost 
to the point of payment, will waive the claim for years. 
But this time the debtor entertained no doubt that the 
debt was to be collected. Death’s call, at such a mo¬ 
ment,—disclosing a visage not much darker than life’s 
own—might be considered even opportune; a refuge from 
his own reproaches and an escape from all enemies. 
Death, in this selfish guise, revolted him. “I feel such a 
coward,” he told his wife, “to leave you at a time like 
this.” 

For her this speech, monstrously distorted through the 
tears with which she looked back on it, presented always 
the blurred gigantic outlines of an epic. Here was death 
rapping at the door; beneath, at the street corner and 
all around, those other creditors planned and whispered. 
And she, defending the stricken man, strove with all the 
love within her to overcome his adversaries—even death 
-—and free the citadel from its investment. She failed, 
of course. Death is no respecter of love, courage or 
womankind. And creditors are creditors. However 
much the gravity of Oswald Holmroyd’s condition might 
be concealed from friends—always scrupulous respecters 
of a trouble likely to make demands on them—from these 
it could not be hid. From lip to lip the rumour spread. 
Specialists had been consulted. Oswald Holmroyd’s state 
of health was critical for all parties concerned. An¬ 
other creditor was in the field. A meeting without delay 
must be arranged. Some settlement must be arrived at. 

The meeting was arranged, that took place (out of 
regard for his condition) in the dying man’s dining-room, 
where wrapped in his dressing-gown with a shawl round 


58 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


his shoulders and propped in an arm chair the dying man 
awaited it. Never would his widow forget that assem¬ 
blage of dark-faced men that gathered about the house 
in twos and threes, short of the appointed hour, and made 
one ringing of the bell admit them all. She watched them 
from the curtained fastness of her bedroom window, with 
a rage at heart. Love is so illogical, so partizan, that 
it never once occurred to her to consider these as fellow 
creatures animated (conceivably) by a love not less in¬ 
tense or illogical than her own, which led them here in 
pursuit of their rights for the defence of homes as dear 
to them as this to her that their entry threatened. 

When the last of them had been admitted, and the pre¬ 
liminary coughs and shuffling of feet had sunk into a 
silence that seemed to suffocate the very heart of the house, 
she stole downstairs and took her station by the door,— 
to bear her share of suffering with Him; to clasp her 
hands and watch and guard. At first the voices, subdued 
with consciousness of the disadvantage under which they 
laboured in presence of one so obviously stricken, rose no 
higher than a murmur. But after awhile, when the spec¬ 
tacle of the sick man had lost its first impressive novelty, 
and a sufficient consideration seemed (for all practical 
purposes) to have been paid him, a warmer current crept 
into the tones of speech. Here and there voices rose 
abruptly above the level of other voices, as if impatient 
of the arbitrary limits within which their common griev¬ 
ance was confined. One such voice—a soulless, toneless, 
grudging, disputative voice, surmounted the murmur from 
time to time as if actuated by intent to pitch the proper 
note of acrimony for the meeting. Its mere inflection, 
aiming to accuse the sick man in his chair, smote her 
solicitude across the lips, and made her draw sharp breath 
with a gasp of pain. More than once, agitated by a 
surging impulse to rescue her loved one from his martyr- 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


59 


dom, she threw out her hand towards the door. She 
heard the tired accents of her husband’s voice, and the 
accents of this other voice that negatived or scorned it, 
and mingled voices contending among themselves, and the 
sound of hortatory knuckles rapped upon the table. And 
regardless of the promise given to her husband, her out¬ 
raged love could no longer be denied. Without reason, 
without warning, driven solely by the power of her 
woman’s impulse, she turned the handle of the door and 
made herself an active partner in his shame. 

Her entrance, during one short moment, struck all this 
animation to stone. She had a perception—too ‘instan¬ 
taneously vivid, like the lightning flash, for her startled 
senses to register—of faces curiously turned, of figures 
seated and statuesquely standing, of arms extended, of 
a table littered with hands and papers, of a meeting trans¬ 
fixed in the supreme instant of intensity. At that, the 
force which had impelled her thus far failed. Her eyes 
sought and fastened on the figure of her husband, whose 
lips shaped her name reproachfully: “Margaret!” 
From him she turned her gaze again upon his persecutors. 

“Please . . . O! please,” she begged with a voice of 
shocked entreaty. “My husband is . . .” “Dying,” truth 
might have added. “Dying” was the dreadful word she 
stopped at, the word her helpless eyes confessed to them. 
“My husband is . . . seriously ill” she said instead. 
And obeying the dictate of a sudden tenderness that 
burned almost to ferocity in its desire to share his mar¬ 
tyrdom, and prove to these hard faced men her hus¬ 
band’s worth, she passed all swiftly to his side, drew his 
head into the protection of her arms, and kissed him. 

2 

More dreadful than his death were the mocking obse¬ 
quies and bitter days that followed. While that serene 


60 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


countenance still shone from its pillow her security seemed 
unassailed. Here, with her beloved dead in the pure at¬ 
mosphere of perfect sorrow, she felt raised above all reach 
or soil of earth. From the world’s petty frets and cares; 
from ignoble griefs and mean anxieties, she arose in com¬ 
pany with the dead to this impenetrable halting place 
betwixt the grave and heaven. For three days, undying, 
she knew death; tasted its sweetness and tranquillity. 

All this the funeral destroyed, rending pious illusion 
with the rough hand of reality. The body, so passion¬ 
ately guarded, must be given up at last; this fine sorrow 
must suffer admixture with coarse and worldly impur¬ 
ities; with the muffled tramp of undertakers’ men; with 
the creaking hearse, the oscillating coaches; the long, in¬ 
terminable progress through Clothton’s busy streets— 
brimming with laughter and animation, prying curiosity 
or stolid disregard—into the dismal area slowly reached, 
whose heart was a minute-beating bell; where, beneath the 
inken tower of a sooty church, amid a congregation of 
soot-blackened tombstones, his last home yawned for Os¬ 
wald Holmroyd at the foot of an untidy mound of yellow 
clay. 

To the mercies of this sacred place, wrapped in the 
mantle woven from the belchings of a thousand chimneys, 
heart-rent and reluctant she left her dead. Reality, dof¬ 
fing his specious habiliments of woe as utterly as the sex¬ 
ton did, stood in readiness to remind her of her obliga¬ 
tions to an altered world. The mourning coach, rolling 
on its too responsive springs, cast aside all pretence of 
consideration for wounded feelings. Freed from the ob¬ 
struction of a hearse it bowled homeward with the gay in¬ 
consequence of a hackney cab. The uplifted blinds ad¬ 
mitted a profane and staring light into the so-recent 
sanctuary of sorrow, and revealed its soulless void. 
Voices, that had for these three bygone days been mur- 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


61 


murous, mere attenuated shadows of themselves, became 
voices once again, impinging too hard upon the flinch¬ 
ing ear of trouble. Everything that had made death 
bearable, or sorrow sacred, Reality removed. These 
were mere drapery for the dead (Reality reminded her). 
To-day there was no dead to be considered. No corpse 
availed her now. She was alone. Hard facts, not sa¬ 
cred visions, confronted her. 

She was Oswald Holmroyd’s widow, and the lesson of 
his death was wasted on her, for she was very proud. 
Pride had been in large degree the secret of her hus¬ 
band’s unsuccess. Pride had killed him. The pride that 
reposes too confidently on its virtue like a strong man 
on his strength; that thinks sheer merit should succeed; 
that will not use its elbows to assist ability, or push when 
pushed in turn. Out of stern duty to the insolvent dead 
must she be doubly independent now. She asked no aid 
of charity. Her children were her own children. She 
should delegate to none their care and love. Such in¬ 
dependence was very reassuring to relatives and friends, 
whom it enabled to take credit for an aid rejected, and 
to retire with the most praiseworthy forebodings, sub¬ 
mitting to a woman’s foolish obstinacy that nothing short 
of the gentlest persuasion could have overcome. Nor 
did her independence stop short of taking charity alone. 
It went to lengths that caused her late husband’s law¬ 
yers to shake their heads and show a very laudable con¬ 
cern for this misguided creature whose quixotic duty 
sought to rise superior to the law. The law had been 
framed, they wisely pointed out, for just such contingen¬ 
cies as hers. Oswald Holmroyd’s creditors would bene¬ 
fit under the law to the precise extent that the law al¬ 
lowed them,—which (though they could not yet commit 
themselves to say for certain) might conceivably amount 
to ten shillings or twelve and sixpence in the pound. 


62 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Since her late husband’s creditors were prepared to take 
advantage of the legal position so far as it affected them, 
surely it was for her to do no less. 

But pride would not listen to such advocacy. Her 
senseless loyalty to the dead insisted on making his debts, 
like his faults and weaknesses, her own. The memory of 
that dreadful toneless voice, monotonizing its reproaches 
in the dead man’s dining-room, stung self-respect to mad¬ 
ness. Those dwindling hundreds of surviving pounds— 
the last remnants of her own small fortune, too sadly 
drawn upon in recent months—must lend their aid to free 
the dead man’s name from the least whisper of insinuation. 
She would take shelter behind none of the law’s invidious 
distinctions. Into their lives no division had ever entered. 
He and she had been but one* Their joys, their sorrows, 
hopes and fears and consolations—all were shared. His 
defamation was her shame. She would not hide behind 
a debt-dishonoured grave. To the last pound they should 
be paid, some day, these dues, if God but gave her life 
and strength. 

And so her pride prevailed, and the thin lips of the 
law, that a satiric faint smile frosted at the edges, de¬ 
ferred to this perverse acceptance of needless obligations, 
saying: “If she wished it so, Mrs. Holmroyd.” And 
she wished it so. And it was so. 

And when the last dread formalities of death and debit 
had been confronted, Oswald Holmroyd’s widow took her 
two children by the hand and turned her back on all that 
earth held dearest to her. 

The act seemed like desertion of the dead. But there 
was no alternative. A hundred reasons rent her heart 
and strengthened her resolve. The very friends that 
might have helped necessity offered a stumbling block to 
pride. So long as she remained in Clothton would she 
perpetuate a living memorial to his failure. It could not 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


63 


be. Her pride and love were all in conflict; each can¬ 
celling the other. She must go where humility might be 
free. Where love might sink upon its knees, if need were, 
on any service consecrate to him. 

3 

Through every act of woman’s life there flows a hid¬ 
den stream of instinct whose winding course the footsteps 
of her conduct follow. Her acknowledged reasons are 
but the straws that float upon it, marking a current be¬ 
yond their guidance or control; a current that gives direc¬ 
tion to her logic, and force to her convictions, flowing un¬ 
interrupted from the primal source of her sex. 

So, the reasons that led Mrs. Holmroyd to Dane- 
borough were, in man’s conception of the term, no reasons. 
For she knew little of this quiet market town beyond its 
name. But the name attracted her. Once, indeed, in his 
latter moments of despondency her husband had inclined 
to utter it, saying that this place (perhaps; who knows 
. . .) might have served them better than grimy Cloth- 
ton. Other reasons too there were, all of them drawing 
hallowed authority from death. An old, well-trusted 
servant in her mother’s days had come from Daneborough, 
or near it, returning ultimately to her native place to 
die. Now, by that communicable grief that holds out 
hands to every other grief, and kindles tapers of affec¬ 
tion above remote and long forgotten graves, the feeble 
glimmer from this distant tomb assumed a brightness al¬ 
most stellar in its comfort. Those lips unsealed from 
their long slumber spoke again to Mrs. Holmroyd as 
they had familiarly spoken in earlier days. Led by such 
unexceptional woman’s reasons, therefore, she brought her 
family to Daneborough. 

At first she took refuge in apartments, till sorrow should 


64 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


be weaned ; till it should be made conversant with its altered 
whereabouts, and learn the character and lineaments of 
the strange place from which its living must henceforth 
be won. These rooms were in the Horse Green—which 
is the open space abhorrent to maternity when Dane- 
borough’s horse fairs are being held, and quadrupeds with 
malice in their rolling eyeballs and puffed nostrils, and 
murder in their iron heels, thunder riotously up and down 
like hurricanes on four legs, attached to pigmy grooms 
by precarious headropes, threatening the brains of in¬ 
fancy. For anybody but Sorrow, with two small chil¬ 
dren to support, these rooms—albeit small—might have 
been comfortable enough, for only infrequent passers-by 
darkened their flat windows, and across the open square 
in front of them stood but the rampart of a stone-coped 
wall between the eyes of sorrow and the vista of illimitable 
green it sighed for. 

But for sorrow these rooms were cramped and hateful. 
Clean, after their manner, they might be. Nevertheless, 
to sensitive nostrils they exhaled the alien odours of the 
lodging house: an odour of necessitous stuffs and hard- 
used furniture divested of all individuality by years of 
loveless service, hinting too dreadfully at her own future 
still unperceived and feared. Worst of all—though she 
knew this not till later—these rooms were graduates in 
sorrow like herself. They knew what it meant to have 
lost a good husband. Why, to be sure, the very best; 
whose virtues had been imposed on, and whose life had 
been laid low by qualities which, out of a native gentle¬ 
ness of soul (it seemed) he had lacked the necessary firm¬ 
ness to subdue. He had been too good to people; he had 
studied them too much, and himself too little. These 
rooms understood what it was to leave a good home. 
They had felt the same as Mrs. Holmroyd when fate sum¬ 
moned them to surrender their lovely large kitchen and 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


65 


two gas stoves and come here. They understood only too 
well what it meant to come down in the world. If their 
husband had only listened to the advice they gave him 
they might have been driving their pony trap to-day, 
for it was a good House they had to leave, possessed of an 
old established custom, with an off license and an ex¬ 
cellent back door. 

One might have thought that sorrow, companioned by 
a sorrow so identical and sisterly, should have found a 
well of healing in this providential place. But no. As 
though sickened with the proffer of a sustenance too fa¬ 
miliar, her soul revolted. Sorrow possesses a religion 
of its own. That her dead husband should be reduced to 
partake of God’s hospitality in company with a promis¬ 
cuous gathering of eleventh-hour repentants, affronted 
her faith. Surely there must be differentiations even in 
the guest house of God. 

At base, perhaps, the matter was no more than the 
competitive jealousy of widowhood in regard to the re¬ 
spective excellencies of dead husbands; one of whom ad¬ 
vocated the champion claims by assertion, the other by 
a shocked and shrinking reticence. But here, at least, 
she could no longer stay. The licensed victualler com¬ 
mitted to the cemetery more than twenty years before 
rose up to make this transitory home untenable for a hus¬ 
band so beloved as hers. 

And then, too, she suffered a soul’s hunger for some 
place particular to her own loves and hopes and doubts 
and sorrows, that she might consecrate with the hallowed 
name of home. Can it be conceived in these enlightened 
days, when woman has been educated to consider Home 
as part of her martyrdom—can it be conceived with what 
passionate longing the mother of Oswald fought to gain 
freedom from the odious bondage of publicity, even in so 
pedestrian a place as Daneborough, and gather round 


66 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


herself and children once again the pure untroubled ether 
of a home? 

By such emotions animated at last she came to choose 
the house in Springbank Gardens that we have already 
seen by night. Not that Daneborough was for ever 
wrapped in mist or municipal fog. By day the Gardens 
—that at an earlier age were said to have been beautiful 
enough, but that the incursions of successive hordes of 
builders had driven into servitude behind brick walls,— 
shewed a not uncheerful face to the enquiring sun. Where 
Mrs. Holmroyd dwelt the houses were of three storeys, 
single-fronted. Higher up the street they dispensed with 
a story, and the bay window of the front room receded 
into a flat and inconspicuous sash. In one of these latter, 
by rights, she should have been. These were the houses 
(her prudence told her) meet for sorrow such as hers. 
But still the influence of early training clung about her, 
and impeded her actions like a wet skirt. Pride was yet 
recalcitrant. It stooped a little to necessity, but would 
not kneel. Those womanly and worthless reasons, 
thronged with memory and surgent with emotion, rushed 
up to oppose reality. A dreadful optimism persisted 
through all she did. She must not choose a house too 
modest or too small. The handicap of such a dwelling- 
place might prove too heavy for her children. At all 
costs she must strive to keep before their eyes the memory 
and standard of that better, lovelier life from which (but 
for a while) they were exiled; of that best of fathers lost 
to them. 

So the house in Springbank Gardens was chosen with 
the energy of fear, lest the precarious white paper, 
pressed like a wan forehead against the uncurtained 
window-pane, might vanish ghostly on a sudden and leave 
them homeless yet again. Out of the cherished wreckage 
of the old home was this new home made; from the famil- 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


67 


iar furniture of her girlhood’s days, pensioned by love 
when Oswald Holmroyd offered her his heart. The Piano 
on which she had practised so many wretched, happy 
hours as a girl. The cradle of mahogany in which her 
mother and her mother’s mother had rocked in infancy, 
and she in turn; and both her children after her. The 
old bureau belonging to her grandfather, and those Vic¬ 
torian ornaments devoid of any value outside the market 
of affection that had been relegated to a pious limbo at 
Clothton and were now restored, with tears of reconcil- 
iatory joy, to the intimate bosom of the new life. 

True, in the first revulsive throes of pride she had 
talked of sacrificing even these, averring she would take 
nothing from a home which was in substance hers no lon¬ 
ger. But after the first paroxysm of her pride more 
temperate counsels had prevailed. The law, if occasion¬ 
ally it oppress, does sometimes succour. And if the legal 
confidant of her dead husband charged—as to the last 
unwavering six and eightpence he ultimately did—for such 
service as legal skill could render to Oswald Holmroyd’s 
widow, it was to him at least she owed the restoration of 
this precious furniture. For he had said: “I think you 
are making a great mistake, Mrs. Holmroyd. Why 
should you sacrifice your own property of such trifling 
financial consequence to the estate, and of such senti¬ 
mental value to yourself, when there is no need to do 
so?” 

The presence of these familiar and treasured things— 
as we may be sure so astute and versed a lawyer must in 
his legal wisdom have foreseen—helped to fortify his 
client; to make the strange walls beneath their strange 
crude wallpapers bearable. At least, life was not al¬ 
together broken; not altogether severed from the sacred 
past. These old things reconciled her to the new. In 
course of time they would transmit their quality to the 


68 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


unfamiliar features of the house and permeate all its 
spaces with the spirit of intimacy and love. 

4 

The new home at length completed, she turned her 
energies towards the new life. It dismayed her. 

For she had believed, when she broke free of Clothton, 
her chiefest difficulty was escaped. She had believed that 
Clothton’s bricks and mortar and busy streets, its friends 
and memories and deterrent prides were the true realities 
contesting purpose. Coming to Daneborough, her love 
—it seemed to her, for those dear sakes involved—was 
capable of any sacrifice, was capable of doing anything. 
But now she was here; now she had made remote ac¬ 
quaintance with the human elements to be encountered: 
the eyes to be endured, the lips to suffer, the suspicions to 
wince under—she realized what philosophers of the prac¬ 
tical school have long ago acknowledged: that Anything 
is Nothing. In the struggle for a livelihood gentlefolk 
with fine feelings suffer a heavy handicap against ungen¬ 
tle folk without. The willing doer of Anything is at a 
discount, pushed aside by the hardened specialists in 
Something whom no shame deters. And doubly does 
afflicted widowhood stand at a disadvantage before the 
world. Widows with encumbrance, in reduced circum¬ 
stances, are notoriously to be apprehended, as all well- 
wishers will allow. Especially in the first year of their 
widowhood does it behove the cautious to beware. They 
darken the doorway; they suffocate a room; the odour 
of their weeds is left behind them when they go, a depress¬ 
ing atmosphere of tears and sooty crape and deathbeds. 

O, she was aware, this widow, in what small repute her 
state was held. She had herself—now God forgive her— 
in better days lent doubtful ear to pleas of suppliant 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


69 


widowhood, divided betwixt pity and suspicion. To-day 
she was become the thing she judged. Distressed gentil¬ 
ity, offering vague service, inspired not confidence but 
doubt. She must pursue a firmer course than that; take 
up a bolder attitude. The inspiration followed on re¬ 
solve. She would inaugurate a school. 

Yes. A school. Not a pretentious school, straining 
the sinews of her purse and knowledge. A small and man¬ 
ageable school at first, till learning found its feet. Here 
was an enterprise not unbecoming in a lady, susceptible, 
even, of a certain dignity. Her very widowhood, indeed, 
—although she shrank from putting so exalted an estate 
to profit—should be of value to her here, affording anx¬ 
ious parenthood a surety of her seriousness in the super¬ 
vision of youth. 

Trepid, and with an anxious heart, she set about her 
task. To some, such labour had been light enough; to 
her, it cannot be described how onerous it was. In one 
regard, indeed, it was a sort of death she underwent, that 
all her vital processes resisted. Before she could be re¬ 
born to the new life she must first die to the old. She 
died at last, expiring on a selected doorstep, before the 
eyes of her two children. 

Painters, poets, philosophers and theologians of all 
ages have depicted death with the gusto for a topic to 
their liking. Generations of writers, being happily at 
the time alive, have described the experience of dissolu¬ 
tion with such circumstance and detail as would convince 
the dead, were the dead only open to conviction. The 
majority of these have agreed to make Death terrible. 
In this, perhaps, they follow a wise instinct, for if Death 
be not terrible, what is he? A mere ethical nonentity, 
indeed, to be scorned by adults and flouted by children. 
There is, to be sure, an increasing company of writers 
who, for some reason, conspire to regard Death as a sort 


70 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of super-sentimental tax collector, who comes with soft 
music, wreathed in persuasive smiles as beautiful as seven 
and sixpenny chaplets, to collect the earthly imposts due 
to heaven. He is conceived so gentle that little children, 
unafraid, take him by the hand. Old people, at the sound 
of his footsteps, sit up eagerly in bed to greet him. Let 
these two schools dispute among themselves. If Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s experience is anything for living people to 
go by, then is Death indeed a most prodigious thing. 
She surged up to the house door on a tidal wave of blood, 
that seemed for the moment as if it had force enough to 
flood her to the very gates of heaven. Then, as her fin¬ 
gers sought and found the bell, the tide relapsed and left 
her impotent and stranded, the victim of a violent 
tinnitus as if a hundred sanctus bells were ringing in her 
brain. The world about her reeled and swam. This was 
death at last. No mere matter of wills and won’ts, of 
likings or dislikes, but the inexorable Must that puts 
courage and cowardice on one common footing. The 
door of the new world burst open. The old life was dead. 
Her children, watching hand in hand, saw their mother 
engulfed in this strange house, withdrawn from sight as 
utterly as if the Lord had sent a flaming chariot drawn 
by fiery horses down from heaven to fetch her. 

Yet such is the innocence of youth, and so little effect 
have the most prodigious happenings on the untutored 
mind, that they saw nothing untoward in their mother’s 
disappearance. She had merely paid a call and been ad¬ 
mitted by a fresh-cheeked maid in streamers. 

5 

After this she died many times. She died daily. That 
there might be no doubt about her death, no way left open 
for withdrawal, she took official leave of life in the col- 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


71 


umns of the Daneborough Mercury, under the heading 
EDUCATION. Thus 

LADY. (Widow) patient and conscientious. Fond 
of children and teaching. Seeks limited number of 
scholars to educate in small home school along with 
own children. (Boy and Girl.) Every care and 
attention. Thorough religious instruction. For 
terms etc. Apply Box X. Y. Z. 

Here was as painful a decease as any that anybody 
could ask for, entailing pangs to purse and pride alike. 
For it meant she must undergo an odious dissolution 
behind the gauze blind in the dingy office of the Dane¬ 
borough Mercury, and suffer the agony and shame of 
having her announcement read aloud, to herself and two 
attendant advertisers, in the clerk’s unmodulated voice, 
as if it were a police charge against her. The clerk, an 
adolescent who had apparently overgrown his strength 
for deciphering script, stumbled heavily over Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s handwriting, asking “Patient and What? Patient 
and Scientific?” She corrected him with a flushed face, 
—“Patient and conscientious . . .” loathing herself and 
the word that drew such odious notoriety on them both. 
“Oh, Conscientious, is it!” decided the clerk, whose 
critical faculty thus enlightened showed a contestant 
disposition. “It looks more like scientific to me.” And, 
indeed, saying “Stop a minute. Let’s make that plain,” 
—went over the prospective schoolmistress’ imperfect 
handwriting with a pencil. That done, he concluded his 
recital of the charge, devoid of mercy or of punctuation, 
and laid down the black-edged sheet upon the counter at 
last, the better to take stock of his victim’s general state 
of mourning and personal demeanour, asking her with his 
eye fixed upon her upturned veil if “she were the Party.” 
She said she was. “Six shillings,” said the clerk. “Will 


72 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


you call for them or have them sent by post?” He re¬ 
ferred now to hypothetic replies. She hesitated. “Pos¬ 
tage will be extra” the clerk threw in. She said (on 
consideration) she would call. It had shocked her to 
note the dreadful havoc wrought in the morale of her 
purse by the abstraction of six shillings. Truly, the 
costs of death are almost prohibitive. And no letters of 
condolence acknowledged the obituary notice. She won¬ 
dered why. She wondered if she had been wise to 
emphasize her widowhood, that dubious state too publicly 
associated with the distressed disposal of furs, cutlery, 
linen underwear and vertical overstrung pianofortes in 
ebony and gold. Or if the qualities “patient and consci¬ 
entious” might not have been better expressed by “ener¬ 
getic and strict disciplinarian.” It had been, perhaps, 
imprudent to introduce so disputable a topic as religion 
into her advertisement. But the mischief was done. 
Nothing short of another six shillings could undo it. 
Newspaper defunction (plainly) was not for such as her. 
It was an expedient unprofitable and protracted. Educa¬ 
tion—like all life’s best and noblest things—was at a dis¬ 
count : a frail plank to clutch at in the drowning moments 
of necessity. Obviously it could not sustain the heavy ad¬ 
vertising expenses that might be justifiable in the case of 
lodgings (which heaven forbid) or character delineations 
from handwriting, or second-hand harmoniums. It seemed 
plain she must henceforth repose her hopes exclusively 
on doorsteps and bell-pulls. 

For such a quest she was but ill-prepared. She lacked 
the confidence of the born canvasser. Too many con¬ 
siderations oppressed her, she realized. Too many 
obstacles from the standpoint of those on whom she 
called. She was too ready to condone excuses; to justify 
refusal with a smile. 

Moreover, she had no system. No system, that is, 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


73 


reducible to any standard of masculine order. But, 
sweep this test aside, and she was actuated in all she did 
by a system as complex and as baffling as woman’s own. 
She never visited the same street on two successive days, 
or rang at more than one house in a single row, on a single 
afternoon. She showed a woman’s partiality for con¬ 
tradictories; journeyed each day in a direction diamet¬ 
rically opposite to that pursued the day before. And far 
from any attempt to fix her personality on the conscious¬ 
ness of Daneborough, she deliberately varied her goings 
and comings, to the end that she might escape a too con¬ 
tinuous publicity. If these houses requited her human 
confidence reposed in them and received her kindly, she 
raised her veil. Otherwise she kept it lowered, and took 
her leave in a crape seclusion without seeing or being seen. 
And yet, her utter lack of business aptitude apart, few 
women were better qualified to plead. For when her veil 
was lifted it revealed a singularly sweet and gentle face; 
the brows depressed by the weight of recent sorrow; the 
eyes perhaps a little weary, as though too tired for 
laughter; the whole countenance lit up by a smile like 
diffused sunlight, that softened and sweetened it without 
ever sharpening to that hard and brilliant beam in which 
the rays of malice or uncharity begin to glitter. Wherein 
the smile interpreted its owner truly. For Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s nature stopped short of that assured development 
which does not scruple to enhance its stature by mounting 
on to the depreciated qualities of others. Nor had nature 
lent her the voice for saying unkind things. Had such 
a voice ever said them they would have been no longer 
quite unkind. 

Timidly she prosecuted the canvass of her little school. 
At each fresh door her fears revived; her heart beat 
heavily beneath her deep black veil. 

Yet the task, so hard at first to set in motion, once 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


74 

moved gathered a measure of momentum that made it 
easier. Imperceptibly the system that her sorrow so 
resisted, seeing no help in her, inaugurated itself. It 
stereotyped the procedure of her calls. It taught her— 
as it teaches all who have to live by asking—the comfort 
of a formula. Xo longer, in attendance on the opening 
of doors, did she look vaguely to the spirit to lend her 
words; she had them all rehearsed and ready. Xor did 
her formula fail her within doors. This autocrat sys¬ 
tem, once admitted, governed her completely; coerced 
her with phrases that she had scarce believed her courage 
capable of uttering. She must apologize for troubling 
them at such an inconvenient hour . . . But . . . 
And so . . . Having to undertake the education of her 
own two children ... It had been suggested to her 
. . . That she might accept a small number of young 
pupils to share their studies. It would be company for 
them and added interest for her. She loved teaching. 
And children. Her little son was eleven; her daughter 
eight. Far too young, she felt, to send to school just yet. 
Therefore she had ventured . . . 

Thus the system ran, imposing itself relentlessly upon 
her so-called better feelings. For it is only consonant 
with Mrs. Holmroyd’s character that the discovery of her 
growing acceptance of this system should fill her with 
concern. She saw in it the ominous break-up of all true 
womanhood, of all fine nature. So long as grief remained 
a dumb and helpless thing, without leadership or direc¬ 
tion, so long was it hallowed. But when widowhood 
admitted the dictatorship of worldly wisdom; when griefs 
grew practical—what, O! what was likely to become of 
character? She feared her own had suffered hurt 
already. She went so far as to enquire of her suspected 
conscience if these daily visits were being paid out of 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


75 


submission to necessity alone. “Am I / 9 she asked herself 
with pious concern, “Am I growing to like them? Am I 
being led by a love of distraction; the curious desire to 
pry into strange houses; the secret longing for conversa¬ 
tion? By any motive, in a word, except my duty 
towards Him and Them?” 

It was a question on which she arrived at no definite 
conclusion—save to Hope and Trust Not. For one 
thing, about this time the slowly ripening fruits of sys¬ 
tem came to maturity, and all her conscientious scruples 
were thrown into confusion by the acquirement of a first 
pupil. Such success seemed like a shaft of sunlight 
divinely sharpened to pierce sceptic doubt and sanctify 
courage. Success, whatever may be alleged against it 
by reformers and fanatics, has an effect not less stimula¬ 
tive of faith than of business energy. Within the week 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s zeal was rewarded with a second pupil, 
and before the wave of uplifted thankfulness had left her, 
with a third. 

It was a school already. Before such a token of 
prosperity how could she hesitate longer? Without 
delay she bought some benches for her school to sit on, 
and two scholastic tables of soft white wood. Providence- 
in a friendly mood and greatly pleased with Mrs. Holm- 
royd*s gratitude, guided her footsteps to the window of 
a broker’s shop where a glazed and jaundiced wall-atlas 
of the ancient world awaited her on a roller with pink 
tape, at eighteen pence. Also an imposing ebony ruler 
somewhat too heavy for the adroit rapping of knuckles, 
but useful to point with. A basketful of scholastic 
books, graded in size to suit all ages, completed the 
bargain. Filled with a new importance Oswald and his 
sister took turns at carrying these proud possessions 
home. 


76 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


6 

Thus the little school was founded. The varnished 
atlas went upon the wall in the room on the first floor 
that overlooked the street. The new planed benches 
flanked the two deal tables and contributed the bleakness 
apposite to learning. 

Here, day by day, from half past nine till twelve, and 
from two o’clock till four, Mrs. Holmroyd directed the 
education of her charges. Of these, including her own 
two children, there were a dozen all but one. They con¬ 
stituted, for the most part, a mixed and sickly lot; the 
fragile residuum of families too backward or too delicate 
for ordinary schools. There was the little daughter of a 
confectioner in the Market Square whose eyes were weak, 
so that their close application to books was out of the 
question, and she must sit stanching them with her hand¬ 
kerchief, gazing tearfully from her place as if she wept 
a parent dead and dear. There was a feeble little fel¬ 
low, too, the son of a neighbouring plumber, who had swal¬ 
lowed part of his father’s soldering outfit in infancy, 
and forthwith ceased to grow. There was the little 
daughter of a nonconformist minister, suffering from a 
respiratory affection that to-day would be unhesitatingly 
identified as Adenoids, who, furnished with a slate and 
pencil, was convulsed to the verge of suffocation in the 
tracing of a single pothook. Each seemed to suffer from 
some ailment or a habit. The manners of most were 
tainted. They came from homes of humble commerce 
and of petty trade, bringing with them their heritage of 
congenital idiosyncracies: the shameless sniff, the hic¬ 
cough unabashed; an assortment of mannerisms as varied 
as it was unlovely. Mrs. Holmroyd feared the influence 
of all these imperfections on her children—but what was 


THE BEST OF FATHERS 


77 


to be done? Such horrible habits (when providentially 
there should be more of them) represented the daily bread 
for her and hers. She must not quarrel with the crusts 
that fed them. 

They fed them barely; they did not feed them quite. 
Twelve scholars all but one (and two of these her un¬ 
profitable own) at thirty shillings a quarter payable in 
advance or in arrear, or by arrangement, subject to a 
reduction for sisters, brothers, near relatives, or even 
friends, do not yield a superabundance. The afflicted off¬ 
spring of the plumber, made sickly by the inconstant piece 
of metal in its fitful travel through his system, would ab¬ 
sent himself at intervals from school. Despite the most 
solicitous enquiries on the part of Mrs. Holmroyd, who 
wasted not a moment after school was over in calling 
with her children at the plumber’s home, these absences 
(consolidated like the plumber’s time-sheet) reappeared 
at pay-day in the guise of a plea for reduction. Sim¬ 
ilarly, the eyes of the pastrycook’s daughter which de¬ 
barred her from participating to the full extent in the 
advantages of Mrs. Holmroyd’s instruction, furnished a 
tearful reason for rebate. The daughter of the noncon¬ 
formist minister alleged the closeness of the schoolroom 
as a cause of headache; the nonconformist minister’s wife 
wondered, in making reference to the subject, if Mrs. 
Holmroyd thought her room was really large enough to 
serve the cause of education. The cold acquired by an¬ 
other scholar was charged against the schoolroom’s too 
prevalent fresh air. Only widows with two children and 
no means beyond the margin of a precarious deposit at the 
bank can realize the awful responsibilities incurred by 
the keeping of a school, where every sniffle overt or con¬ 
cealed is viewed by apprehension as the possible precursor 
of an epidemic calculated to bring scholasticism to ruin; 
where life’s edifice, in short, is reared on no surer, stabler 


78 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


foundation that the whims and healths of fitful children. 

Thus was she, by a natural transition, led on to pork 
pies and sausages. For it seemed clear that this home 
could derive no adequate security from a dozen assorted 
ailments. Some other method must be thought of. Her 
pride must make some further sacrifice if necessary. 
And as it was necessary, her pride came down to pork 
pies and sausages. Not ordinary pork pies. Not ordi¬ 
nary sausages. But pork pies and sausages such as 
had been made in more prosperous days, by the faith¬ 
ful servant of her girlhood, whose footsteps to Dane- 
borough she had followed. Such pies as Hannah 
once had made—if Mrs. Holmroyd could but recapture 
the recipe—possessed a soulful flavour, a sanctity of 
their own. The finest ingredients—care, skill, love, clean 
hands and a strict conscience—were requisite to make 
them as Hannah used to make them, and as they should 
be made. These qualities Mrs. Holmroyd had. Best of 
all, the pies might be baked in her own kitchen; in the 
bosom of her family. Composed faithfully to formula, 
and offered tentatively to the world at first through the 
medium of her little school, within a month Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s pies and sausages had achieved at least a minor 
reputation. Every Friday evening when her scholars 
were disbanded for the week, and the spirit of learning 
in the deserted schoolroom drew the mantle of intensest 
silence about her shoulders and subsided into academic 
abstraction, the kitchen fire was coaxed to glow. 

And every Friday, tea being over, the little Oswald 
donned his cap and gloves, and, when the dark nights 
needed—which, to his mother’s anxious heart in the vari¬ 
able pork-pie season they generally did—his overcoat and 
knitted muffler, and made the round of all their cus¬ 
tomers, filled with manly self-importance and many fears. 


BOOK III 


THE CHORISTER 

1 

O N the Friday following the Mayor’s historic 
party, Oswald brought his weekly rounds and 
obligations to an end and returned to the gleam¬ 
ing kitchen with his plenished pork-basket a full hour in 
advance of custom. 

Nor, with the vista of sixty golden minutes in front of 
him, could he be persuaded to sit or rest, or do more 
than loosen the knot in his muffler. Neither the Swiss 
timepiece on the kitchen mantelshelf nor the Parish 
Church clock had yet declared the half hour before he 
tugged the ends of his scarf again and protested that 
unless he set off instantly for the Choir Practice he must 
be late, albeit—according to all canons of gentility—it 
was yet a whole quarter of an hour too early for the son 
of the best of fathers to be abroad; home being the 
proper place for every true gentleman (as Oswald knew) 
which he would never consent to exchange for the promis¬ 
cuous openness of streets without good cause. Streets, 
despite their superficial attractiveness, were tutors of 
wickedness; preceptors of ill habits. They spat; they 
swore; they fought; they whistled, smoke and drank. 
The life that flowed in them was no more fit to be imbibed 
unfiltered than the turbid rain water straight from heaven 
that ran down gutters. The spiritual function of streets 
was to make home more precious; its dear ones dearer. 
Let them be walked through, when alone, with an up¬ 
right head and steadfast purpose. For streets, like pas- 


80 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


sages in scripture, are dark and difficult for the lonely 
student to traverse, needing wise commentators to explain 
their meaning, or render them suitably obscure. All of 
which Oswald knew (of his own experience) as well as well. 
By their very fascination he was aware of the deadliness 
of streets, that pulled at his companionship with a score 
of intimate and too persuasive hands, begging him stay 
here and play there; look at this and listen to that; to 
do, in a word, the things that so many of his age and sex 
did systematically, and with such obvious delight. For 
the avoidance of which dangers when attending choir 
practice he was accustomed to leave home no earlier than 
was necessary to bring him with punctuality to the vestry 
door—truth compelling the melancholy admission that 
vocal service in the house of worship affords no proof of 
gentility, and that many of those who lend their lips for 
hire to the praise of holiness are not, as Mrs. Holmroyd 
was aware, fitting companions for sons of the best of 
fathers. 

Indeed, the proposal that her son should be reduced 
from the dignity of worshipping his Maker from a 
cushioned pew to the status of a chorister, cut straight 
through the tissue of her devoutest prejudices as deep as 
her tears; and not the less so because the blow to her 
spiritual pride was struck by the senior curate of St. 
Saviour’s. 

Such a thing, her troubled pride reflected, would never 
have been hinted in the best of fathers’ time. For at 
this period her pride had not yet descended to the baking 
of pork pies. It was still very homeless and susceptible, 
as the Curate must have perceived, for he made haste to 
repair his blunder by assuring Mrs. Holmroyd that he 
had not intended to suggest her son should sing in the 
choir for a consideration, but as an unpaid, voluntary 
member. Already (he was at pains to make clear) the 


THE CHORISTER 


81 


choir of St. Saviour’s was happily strengthened by three 
or four sons enlisted from the families of parishioners 
of standing. A doctor’s son, and a lawyer’s son, he in j 
stanced to adduce no more. In answer to her question 
he rather fancied there was no architect’s son—as yet. 
But the Organist (Mr. Rencil) was, he said, a gentleman, 
a charming fellow, and a musician of accomplishment in 
whose hands Mrs. Holmroyd might entrust her little boy 
without a moment’s hesitation. Indeed, to Mr. Rencil’s 
persuasive charm and the high esteem in which his char¬ 
acter was held, the curate acknowledged the infusion of 
this better class of singer at St. Saviour’s to be largely 
due. It was having (said he) a marked effect upon the 
conduct of the choir and the devotional fervour of the 
congregation, and was contributing not a little towards 
the elevation of the worship of God. 

The argument, planted in such unquestionable soil and 
nurtured with so much piety, bore fruit. That the 
senior curate of St. Saviour’s recognized how distasteful 
any consideration of money must be for gentlepeople re¬ 
duced to feel the need of it, offered a great consolation 
to pride. Pride being so inconsistent as to reject the 
solid food essential to its support and resolutely subsist¬ 
ing on slops, Mrs. Holmroyd was more grateful for a 
few words meaning nothing than she would have been for 
a little money meaning a great deal. Perhaps, after all 
(she told herself) here was an opportunity. It might 
be providential. Oswald’s musical talents might be 
quickened. 

And on the next Sunday but one, palpitating under the 
importance of his novel vestment, Oswald took his place 
as a chorister in the chancel of St. Saviour’s. It was 
noticed, when to the solemn reverberation of the organ, 
succeeding a remote Amen, the choir moved slowly into 
sight, that the lady in mourning with haste let down her 


82 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


veil, whilst the little girl by whom she was accompanied, 
drawing closer to her side and plucking her by the sleeve, 
exclaimed in a whisper of searching intensity: 

“He’s there!” 


2 

For all Oswald had so much time at his disposal he 
walked with the urgent air of one for whose business the 
moments are not too plentiful; pressing forward with his 
wonted staid and concentrated gait; his whole figure in¬ 
fused with the dutiful self-consciousness that obviously 
moves by lofty precept and to pious pattern. 

The night was of November mildness, draped with a 
haze not dense enough to hide the stars, that hung en¬ 
meshed in it here and there like raindrops in a cobweb, 
grey and beamless. About this mist was nothing muni¬ 
cipal; nothing mayoral. The mayor’s party, dead like 
the week before, and evaporated into the past with the 
fog that solemnized it, might be thought of on such a 
night without envy and without a tear. Two columns 
of descriptive letterpress, with a complete list of guests 
and several letters on mayoral invidiousness, addressed to 
the respective editors, beginning tartly: “Sir,” and 
signed “Disgusted,” or “Ratepayer” appearing in the 
contestant weekly papers, that issued damp and smoking 
from the press that very morning, marked all that was 
left of last week’s glory. A movement had been instigated 
(so the papers said) to present the Mayor’s daughter with 
an album containing the photographs of all her guests, 
which, suitably inscribed and bound in red morocco with 
gilt edges and a brass clasp, would supersede the family 
Bible as an object of parlour veneration in her after 
years. All during the week desultory cabs, rumbling 
without urgency, had conveyed the bodies of contributors 


THE CHORISTER 


83 


to the local studios, where their altered features were 
composed into a seemly dissimilitude of life beneath the 
professional hands of gentlemen who called themselves 
artist photographers and who were, in point of fact, pic¬ 
torial layers-out. But these relics of a defunct glory— 
like the virtues of the dead, that inspired small envy— 
were bearable. Diluted by time, and converging to no 
ecstatic beam of splendour on a selected portion of eter¬ 
nity, they roused not any longings. To-night nodded its 
head as complacently as a tired child in a chair, un¬ 
troubled by desires. The thick coverlet of last week’s 
fog being lifted, distinguishable sounds even from afar 
rose up into the void above the sleepy town; the barking 
of distant dogs, the shouts of playing children, streets 
and streets away; the harsh thud of the steam hammer, 
falling with forty ton force on soft metal at the railway 
works; the clank and snort and reckless clash of colliding 
buffers from the shunting yard, where agile engines 
singled and assembled trucks with the vigilance of sheep 
dogs; the slow, stertorous breaths of some labouring lo¬ 
comotive, harnessed to half a mile of groaning mineral 
waggons that crept reluctantly behind it—always a fea¬ 
ture of the night-time at Daneborough. 

That Mrs. Holmroyd drew comfort from the clearer 
night and lack of cabs only showed how feminine and 
limited was her understanding of the nature of the outer 
world her son walked in. With the removal of the dense 
and pall-like fog a protection not less than a menace was, 
for Oswald, withdrawn. If the fog had brought nearer 
the terrors of the unseen and the unknown, the absence of 
it left him at the mercy of the known and seen. The very 
outlets of the street he lived in held terrors of their own. 
There was the street made formidable with a public house 
called the “Breadloaf,” largely frequented by wives of 
the district, that to unobservant eyes differed little from 


84 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the dwelling houses it adjoined, save that it thrust out 
a lantern at the end of an iron bracket above an open 
door from which the coarse breath of laughter blew in 
gusts at times, redolent of beer. Out of this same door 
Oswald had with his own eyes seen reeling men emerge 
who staggered blindly as they walked, and sometimes 
fell, and rose again with horrible alacrity, drawing blood 
away from crimson mouths on the back of their hands. 
How can the full horror of such a spectacle be communi¬ 
cated to adults? Gentleman or no gentleman, such a 
moment is not one to stand on ceremony or reflect at 
length upon the best of fathers. Away! Away at once 
on feet of desperation, flogged forward by the awful 
menace of that bleeding mouth and crimson knuckles, to 
where, breathless and palpitating, the fugitive can halt to 
gather up his disassembled self and collect the remnants 
of gentility out of the seething turmoil of impressions. 
Every figure met thereafter bears resemblance to the 
drunken man. Even the lamp-posts rock and sway. The 
whole world is rendered unstable. The stars, dislodged 
by the turbid beating of the runner’s heart stagger about 
the sky. And what a fearful colour is red. It is a 
terror of itself. No logic can stanch the bleeding of that 
mouth. 

And but a street or so beyond there lies another zone 
of awful possibilities. It is of stone. A gloomy build¬ 
ing, many-windowed, railed off from the roadway by iron 
railings, whose entrance two great iron lamp-posts guard. 
Even the lamps exert an awful influence of their own, for 
they are round. Round, in this conjunction, is horrible. 
It means inexpressible things. It means, for one thing, 
that this is an Infirmary. Precisely what Infirmary 
means is yet (for Oswald) unsure. But people are 
taken in and out on stretchers, and crowds follow them, 
and sometimes women wring their hands, and children 





THE CHORISTER 


85 


gaze with their mouths open, and dogs get trodden on, 
and the spirit of calamity seems to be let loose, and dire 
fears fasten on the heart, and life grows dim and dread¬ 
ful. Oswald has been sucked into the vortex of the crowd 
that swept gentility along with it to the iron railings; 
and he has gazed enthralled at the globular lamps and 
and at the plate-glass windows beyond, reflecting blank 
horror from their blanched panes; and he has been 
whelmed in the comments of the crowd—every mouth a 
running source of terror. The victim is dead; the vic¬ 
tim is not dead; his neck is broken; his neck is not broken, 
it is his leg. It is not his leg, it is his arm. He has been 
run over; he has fallen from a scaffold; he has been 
drowned; his head has been taken off at the railway sta¬ 
tion; he has committed suicide. A woman, informed by 
neighbours on insufficient evidence that the victim is her 
husband, transfixes the crowd with a scream. The 
scream goes through Oswald and curdles his blood. He 
awakes to a consciousness of no stomach and a trembling 
at the knees. He is hemmed in by mouths and pulled at 
by strange hands. Filled suddenly with awful fear of 
the hydra-headed danger called a crowd, he remembers the 
best of fathers and fights his desperate way out from this 
contestant mass of curiosities. 

How can the terror of the tramp of awed and urgent 
feet attendant on a moving stretcher be conveyed to com¬ 
plaisant, upgrown understandings?* How can one tithe 
of these living terrors be expressed? They cannot be 
conveyed; they cannot be expressed. Dreadfullest of all, 
they must not be expressed. Why! To the sons of gen¬ 
tlemen even words can be more terrible than mortals are, 
and silences more shudderful than sound. Sheets thrown 
sportively above the head, or lying limp upon the mat¬ 
tress, or a coat suspended, motionless, on a peg behind 
a door, or folded garments laid upon a chair in some 


86 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


room where the stealthy fingers of dusk begin to grope 
and stray,—these are no insentient harmless things as 
adults suppose, but plenipotentiaries from the kingdom of 
the terrors. They feel, they think, they live, endowed 
with a monstrous mobility that can make itself dead men, 
hanged men, drowned men, murdered men, or any sort of 
men to be afraid of, in a moment. 

Aye! In a moment can they. And the sons of gentle¬ 
men, bound by the solemn covenant of their calling, must 
be secret as the grave, affecting to see the features of this 
altered world still tranquil and serene, as their mothers 
see them. Evening falls, and the bedly hour draws near. 
The good night kiss can be no longer delayed. The 
stairs, assuming eyes and a physiognomy, lurk malici¬ 
ously in wait for sons of gentlemen. Would to God they 
had never passed the Infirmary, or seen blood wiped from 
a red mouth with the back of a hand, or brought them¬ 
selves within the clutches of the Law. 

For the very policemen whose leisured tread brings 
comfort to adults, and whom the upgrowns pass with an 
indifference bordering on contempt, lend dread gravity to 
street corners. They stand like carved monuments be¬ 
neath a gas-lamp. A pang goes through the breast at 
sight of them. Conscience, startled by their immobility 
that is so sculptured and accusing, makes a hurried in¬ 
ventory of its crimes. How shall they be confronted? 
By what demeanour is their august indulgence to be won? 
By humility (it seems). By a self-effacement almost ab¬ 
ject. By a stoppage of the breath, by a clenching of the 
palms, by a stepping on the toes, by a supplicative sad¬ 
dening of the mouth, by a supreme faith and trust in 
heaven. 

His course beset and modified by such considerations, 
the little Oswald pursued his way to church. He boldly 
crossed the Horse Green (made complex with many cries) 


THE CHORISTER 


87 


to its darker and deserted side, and pressed forward to 
where through a narrow neck or stricture it led him into 
upper Hill Street. To the right of him—already visited 
this evening—lay St. Lawrence Square. Doctors lived in 
Hill Street too, as brass plates of the most noble propor¬ 
tions testified. Here was St. Saviour’s Vicarage, for 
whose due acknowledgment (being a chorister) Oswald 
always composed his lips, in passing, to a processional 
solemnity, in case the Canon might by any chance be at 
the window. Over the road, obliquely facing it, stood 
Mr. Rencil’s house, through the Venetian blinds of whose 
upper windows golden bars of light shone forth like glori¬ 
fied staves of musical notation. Perhaps Mr. Rencil’s 
self was there behind this gilded latticework of lines and 
spaces. 

Something like a thrill passed through Oswald’s bosom 
at the sight of this emblem of high musicianship, to which 
he elevated an allegiant and venerating gaze. 

3 

“Hey!” 

Oswald was passing the historic livery stables, between 
the reverberating archway and the pump. Stripped of 
mist and imagination they showed less than half the size 
of the week before. The pump, as if conscious of being 
but a hack plaything for local infancy, hung its ball 
head and drooped its wooden handle like a seaside donkey 
during those sad spare moments when it has leisure to 
reflect upon its lot. Trivial little lights, peeping out of 
doors and windows of no importance (that had been too 
cowed to dare the darkness and show their craven faces 
the week before) now made friends with the evening and 
held companionable colloquies one with another, as 
neighbours do. 


88 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Hey!” 

The interjection, that had been successively a whistle, 
eatery, cockcrow and dogbark (all which, the hurrying 
Oswald had an uncomfortable feeling signified himself, and 
being so obviously pitfalls for gentility had resolutely 
ignored) came abreast with much breathing and a 
palpable hotness of cheeks, and fell into step with the 
object of its pursuit in such an ostensible manner as to 
make further preoccupation on Oswald’s part impossible. 

“Didn’t you hear me call of you?” the newcomer 
enquired. “I’ve been calling of you all the way from Hill 
Street corner.” 

There was a friendliness in this accost so oblivious of 
social disparities that Oswald, shrinking from falsehood, 
acknowledged it with an interrogative “Have you?” into 
which he infused as much surprise as conscience would 
allow. 

For this, that fell into step with him, was one of the 
dangerous influences feared by motherhood. This with 
the plaid kerchief round its neck, breeched in hybrid 
corduroy continuations that were too short for trousers 
and too long for knickerbockers, was a fellow chorister. 
Not a gentleman chorister. Not a volunteer, like Oswald 
and the doctor and lawyer’s sons. A paid chorister, who 
wore a white apron and oversleeves and lurched round 
Daneborough each Saturday with a big meat basket on 
his arm and hip, and nodded to Oswald with intimacy even 
when Oswald was -accompanied by his mother; never 
raising his hat, but singling Oswald out for invidious 
salutation as if mothers and ‘sisters were irrelevant; pitch¬ 
ing an amicable “hello!” in a voice that had no more 
respect for gentility than a flung stone has for a front 
window, and even whistling after Oswald with intent to 
ratify a treacherous compact of their choral brotherhood 
behind his mother’s back. Whether this boy constituted 


THE CHORISTER 


89 


a friend or foe Oswald could never quite decide. Equally 
he seemed at home in Oswald’s company, or the company 
of Oswald’s fellow-foes, adapting his conduct to which 
ever society he chanced to move in at the moment; at 
times deriding gloves and a clean collar, and mimicking 
the hateful accents of gentility; at other times accosting 
gentility like an old and favoured friend. 

And yet to-night, despite all complications of compan¬ 
ionship this presence brought a certain comfort with it, 
assuring Oswald that the hour was not so utterly fantastic 
as he feared, and that he would not find the church 
foundered in darkness, all its gates shut and padlocked, 
the practice over, the choristers departed. Indeed the 
new arrival chided Oswald for his haste, enquiring: 
“What’s your hurry?” and being met with a tepid 
reference to time, flouted this ancient proprietor of scythe 
and hourglass as one unworthy the fear of any but aged 
people and the very young. By the side of his undaunted 
comrade Oswald felt a pleasant sense of security. He 
walked, as one might say, in the shadow of a mighty 
hunter, armed at all points against Time’s surprises and 
alarms; and this lion of life’s jungle grew harmless as a 
lamb. The satisfaction Oswald derived from this aspect 
of their companionship caused him to sadden at the 
thought that the chorister in the corduroy extremities 
was no gentleman, and that any lasting friendship be¬ 
tween them was impossible. A melancholy reflection that 
took on a deeper significance when the boy by his side, 
plunging his right hand for a space into the depths of his 
pockets, brought forth a palmful of coppers for Oswald’s 
wonder, with the remark: 

“See them? Do you know how much there is there?” 

He clapped the second hand over the first and shook 
the coins vigorously, ostensibly as an aid to Oswald’s 
judgment, but not less (if the truth be told) for the 


90 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


pleasure of appraising the weight and volume of his own 
property. 

Oswald shook his head. 

There was (it seemed) over a shilling’s worth of cop¬ 
pers. All of it made by wassailing. Since Tea. He 
had only just left his sister in order to come to the choir 
practice. He went wassailing (so he told Oswald) every 
evening now. Except Saturdays—when he didn’t get fin¬ 
ished while eleven. Last year he and his sister had made 
over ten shillings apiece by wassailing. As soon as the 
wassailing season closed he followed Christmas boxing. 
By the tone of his enthusiasm it appeared that the pros¬ 
pects of the present season were excellent. The market 
feeling was optimistic. He hoped, in fact, to exceed all 
previous records. Anticipations of success so kindled 
magnanimity within him that he asked why Oswald did 
not go wassailing too. For the moment it almost seemed 
that the proffer of a partnership was pending and Oswald 
dropped his eyes. 

For in that moment—and it was no more—a veritable 
progeny of suppliant thoughts, the lawless children of his 
fantasy, trooped around reason; importunate, persua¬ 
sive. After all . . . was wassailing forbidden to a gen¬ 
tleman? Was there no means by which wassailing might 
be constituted licit—like singing in the choir, or canvass¬ 
ing for orders for pork pies? 

To test the case, Imagination transformed itself into a 
wassailer. A gentlemanly wassailer with a white collar 
and spotless pocket handkerchief, who showed so clean a 
face and rapped with such refinement that not a house but 
welcomed him within its doors to sing. Coppers, yes, and 
silver bits should line his pockets, and his mother’s eyes 
should gleam with pride when he drew home from his was¬ 
sailing each night and she saw the riches his lips had won. 
Tears almost started to his own eyes for very pride of this 


THE CHORISTER 


91 


imaginative second self. The vision, bursting on him 
with a splendour wellnigh unbearable, was shaken to its 
foundations in the same instant by a startling disruption 
of externals. In place of the composed features of his 
companion that seemed to wait on his response, he beheld 
a countenance ecstaticized with the revelation of a 
new and preponderant interest. It was the sound of 
noisy youth, prosecuting its reckless pastimes in the near 
neighbourhood of St. Saviour’s and it acted on the 
corduroy trousers like a trumpet call from heaven. 
Casting Oswald’s companionship to the winds he 
brandished both arms as an aid to motion and uttering 
the cry: 

“Hey up! It’s them. Come on! Hello! Ooli-ooli- 
ooli-ooli! . . .” dashed off in the direction of the sounds 
that had so stirred him. 

Chagrined and solitary, the little Oswald withdrew into 
his empty mansion of gentility, that echoing habitation of 
many windows looking wanly out on the life by which it 
sees itself assailed; at once a prison and a home. There 
were times, and this was one of them, when the melancholy 
truth that gentility spells sacrifice oppressed him. Was¬ 
sailing, Christmas boxing and errand running on Satur¬ 
days were roads to riches. In those detested corduroy 
breeches was deposed more wealth than gentility stood 
possessed of after months of pride and self-denial. 
Lovely as it seemed at home, beneath the glamour of a 
mother’s influence and eyes, gentility was no attribute to 
take abroad. It stood at every possible disadvantage be¬ 
fore the world. To the pushful it must cede; before the 
clamorous it must be silent; generosity must it show to 
the selfish; to the unscrupulous, honesty; justice to the 
unjust; compassion to the hard; pardon to those that 
wronged it. It must assist the poor and be too proud to 
take a penny from the rich. O, what a noble thing it 


92 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


was! How beautiful the world, if everybody in it might 
be gentlemen. 

4 

By this time his reflection had brought him beneath the 
consolidated darkness that was St. Saviour’s, obtruding 
its vague bulk into the sky and displacing some of the 
higher stars with its steeple. The church stood within its 
own acre at the junction of the Hunmouth and London 
Roads, occupying a space of ground whose shape approx¬ 
imated to the superficies of a flat-iron, being bounded at 
the broad western base by iron railings and on its two 
converging sides by a low stone wall topped with a tri¬ 
angular coping, apex uppermost, of small service to sit¬ 
ters. By a sunken wicket in the southern wall, opening 
on a path that led to the side porch and thence, past a 
stone trough and a mouldering scent of dead flowers, to 
the vestry, Oswald dutifully took his stand. 

Save for the internal glimmer of the church and one 
cadaverous lamp, half sunk into the stone above the vestry 
door, whose pallid flame lit nothing but itself, intensifying 
darkness and casting deceptive shadows on the steps it 
was intended to define, the churchyard lay in unalleviated 
gloom, resort chiefly of the dead and sundry amorous 
couples, the latter silent as gargoyles and motionless as 
monuments, that haunted the shadow of the churchyard 
trees, beneath which (upon the southern side, where Os¬ 
wald stood) they propped its leaning wall at intervals 
with the regularity of buttresses. He wondered where 
they came from, these mystic forms at once nebulous and 
solid, and where eventually they went to, and was as rev¬ 
erent in heart towards them as to the sacred edifice itself 
and the serried stones of which he stood in such venerat¬ 
ing awe. Among these latter the more venturesome of 
the paid and early choristers were busy. The church re- 


THE CHORISTER 


93 


verberated with cries immoderate and profane, that re¬ 
bounded from its stony buttresses as if they had been 
balls in a fives court, and the scurry of footsteps over the 
gravel as their owners rioted in the obscurity of conse¬ 
crated ground, using ledgers like vaulting horses and so 
corrupting the decorum of this venerable company with 
their evil communications that the whole churchyard was 
shortly in commotion; headstones leaping like humans, 
and marble crosses starting up with both arms menace- 
fully extended to cry “Hey!” with the abruptness of chor¬ 
isters. Now and again some particularly audacious as¬ 
sault upon the vestry door brought forth the verger, irate 
and imprecatory, to pit his power against the ribald 
darkness that mocked him; declaring to the void— 

“Now, I’m not going to waste my vocabulary on you. 
I know who it is. And Canon shall be cognizant an’ all 
before the night’s out. Don’t think I can’t certify you. 
I can. I can certify you all. I want no colloquy with 
any of you, and if I’ve got to come off this step you won’t 
forget it.” 

Whereat the gravestones masquerading as choristers 
vomited derisive laughter, and a Gothic pinnacle conse¬ 
crated to all the virtues disgorged an obscene word. 

The close proximity of eight o’clock was marked by a 
multiplication of churchyard cries. Soon, in addition to 
the demoniac spirits that debauched the gravity of St. 
Saviour’s tombstones, there gathered an independent clus¬ 
ter round the little iron gate where Oswald stood. Some 
of the more impatient among the newcomers, made 
frantic by the clamour of their kindred beyond, as dogs 
are irresistibly drawn by barking, scrambled likewise over 
the wall. Others instigated independent games in the 
roadway, which they alternated fitfully with more au¬ 
dacious sallies upon the gate and summonses of the 
invisible verger by name: 


94 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Mester Prestwich! Hey-up! Mester Prestwich!” 

Ultimately a shout went up like a triumphant sky 
rocket, tailed with ribaldry. It notified the opening of 
the vestry door, distinguishable as a rectangular stain of 
yellow beneath the blue-lipped lamp. This gave birth to 
a shadow whose increasing definition revealed motion, and 
being too dignified for gravestones (which leaped and 
danced outrageously) identified itself at last with the 
verger’s impressive person. The keys of office jangled 
authoritatively in his hand and any lingering doubt about 
his identity was dispelled at close quarters by the fact 
of his drawing breath with audible difficulty through a 
snuff-clogged nostril. 

His nose, although this hour of darkness did small jus¬ 
tice to it, was by daylight a most episcopal and proper 
organ. One might say without irreverence, it was an 
archiepiscopal organ. When it led the timid to their 
pews or headed a processional, or beckoned hesitating 
strangers out of the porch into the sacred edifice, its di¬ 
lating nostrils seemed to elevate themselves above the 
common odour of mortality and sniff the delectable 
odours of heaven. But for this nose, indeed,—which the 
common race of choristers lacked the vision to appreciate 
—it is said the verger would have forfeited his holy office 
long before the little Oswald came to know him, for he was 
(if truth spoke truly of him, which truth is not notori¬ 
ously prone to do) an individual in his earthly parts most 
spiritual, in his spiritual portions most infirm. Certain 
it is, that the verger’s resignation was more than once ac¬ 
cepted by the Canon before it had been tendered, with 
Christian finality: “I am very sorry, Prestwich. But 
this time I cannot overlook it. I have the welfare of this 
church and the feelings of this congregation to consider. 
If you are incapable of performing your duty it is all 
the more necessary that I must not fail to discharge mine. 


THE CHORISTER 


95 


I have no alternative but to accept your resignation.” 

Which Prestwich translated to parishioners in the 
following terms. 

“I’ve done my best to temporize with him, but I can’t 
put up with the Canon any longer. He’s too heterodox. 
Too heterodox by half. There’s no reasoning with him. 
I’ve done my best to keep things together, for the sake of 
all parties concerned, but if church comes to the ground— 
as it’s sure to do—Canon has nobody but himself to 
blame. He can’t say I haven’t capitulated with him. I 
have.” 

Whereat he would take the opportunity of bidding 
farewell to such parishioners as had any reputation 
for sensitive purses—either in the church or at their own 
homes, whither he betook himself for the purpose—saying 
it would be the last sad occasion on which he would be able 
to speak to them in an ecclesiastical capacity and it was 
not without deep deliberation that he had decided to sever 
his connection with a church and cause so dear to him. 
“I’ve given the Canon every chance. I’ve put up with 
more than most men in my position would have suffered, 
for the sake of worship and the congregation. I know 
the temper of the congregation better than he knows it. 
In my exceptional opportunities for intimate colloquy 
they repose confidences in me that they’d think twice be¬ 
fore depositing in him. If I go, it won’t be long before 
they follow. Church will be empty before many weeks.” 

And the next Sunday, that was to have marked his ab¬ 
sence from St. Saviour’s, and the church’s first step upon 
the road to ruin, saw him floating through the aisles and 
transepts in his sable robes of office as before; balancing 
his wand and elevating his mahogany nostrils like the 
distended louvres of the swell organ at full. For that 
ceremonious member, more securely than the verger’s ver¬ 
bal applications, prevailed over the Canon in the end, as 


96 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


an irreplaceable asset to the church’s dignity. The 
Canon’s self admitted: “Prestwich may occasionally 
drink, but the fellow has a manner with him. If only he’d 
kept himself in hand he might have aspired to a cathe¬ 
dral.” The resignation was remitted. Prestwich was 
given one more chance. He sought the congregation’s 
private ear, and called upon it in its private home, to an¬ 
nounce the Canon’s uncompromising surrender. 

“He’s come to his senses, you’ll be thankful to hear,” 
the verger communicated. “I had a long Conclave with 
him on Saturday, and he earnestly begged me to recon¬ 
sider my dictum for the sake of the church and the parish¬ 
ioners. I told him I was willing to make what sacrifices 
I could to augment congregational harmony and promote 
the unity of worship, but I could allow no interference 
with my office neither from him nor nobody. If that’s in¬ 
terfered with all Authority goes. There’s an end to co¬ 
hesion. It’s the stultification of worship. We might as 
well be nonconformists at once, and done with it. I’ve 
told Canon so. He’s given his word, and so we shall see 
how he goes on.” 

From which it will be remarked that the verger pos¬ 
sessed a literary wardrobe of no ordinary capacity for 
the clothing of his ideas; years of association with dig¬ 
nitaries of every degree having in fact afforded him an 
opportunity to pick up a marvellous secondhand assort¬ 
ment of verbal boots and shoes, shirts, vests and orator¬ 
ical garments in general (some of historical association, 
others nearly new and scarcely shop-soiled) with which to 
mantle the dignity of his calling and garb sentiments 
worthy of his nose. Whether he always wore the gar¬ 
ments of this miscellaneous wardrobe wisely, or in the 
nicest taste, is another question, but such stress did he 
lay on the importance of possessing what he called “a Vo¬ 
cabulary” that his indictment of a fellow-creature could 


THE CHORISTER 


97 


be formulated in no more scathing fashion than an accus¬ 
ation of the lack of it. Whether the accused chanced to 
be a rival verger at St. Gyles’s, or a disfavoured cleric, an 
officious churchwarden, or a male singer addicted to pom¬ 
posity, the judicial question invariably resolved itself 
into; “What is he?” 

“A man of no vocabulary!” said the Verdict. “A man 
you might listen to for a whole day and never hear a word 
come off his lips you didn’t understand. Without a vo¬ 
cabulary no man—I don’t care who he is—can call him¬ 
self complete. As Archdeacon Oliver said to me one day 
in one of the frequent conversational colloquies me and 
him used to have together; ‘Words, not Raiment, make a 
man, Prestwich. Words are power. Words are char¬ 
acter. Words are life. By a man’s Vocabulary may we 
know and judge him.’ 

“. . . But what,” the verger would enquire with indig¬ 
nation and despondency, “. . . what is the good of vo¬ 
cabularies in a place like this ? They’re wasted. They’re 
thrown away. They’re not worth a ha’penny to anybody 
here. They lead to no preferment. There’s more than 
half of mine I can’t use. People wouldn’t comprehend me 
if I did. They’d stare. They’d beg my pardon. I’ve 
known them to do it. People that wears the cloth and 
nominates themselves Clerks in Holy Orders.” 

By now as a result of crowding round the gate and 
consequent displacements, the little Oswald—although the 
first comer to await admission—stood on the outer fringe 
of the throng attendant on the verger’s dignified ap¬ 
proach. The paid choristers, betraying an incomprehen¬ 
sible desire for entry, fought among themselves for pre¬ 
cedence before the bars of the gate, as if they were caged 
animals and this were feeding time. Some of them even 
attempted to retain priority by laying hold of the wicket, 
whereat the verger (displaying wonderful accuracy and 


98 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


promptitude) rapped their knuckles loudly with his key, 
saying, in his nose-congested voice: 

“Now then! Let’s have no colloquy. Don’t let me 
have to tell you twice!” 

This done, he paused and fixed the impatient choristers 
with an eye which, even in the darkness—was felt to be 
terrible. An eye that seemed to deputize for his Vocabu¬ 
lary and produced a marked effect upon the crowd, con¬ 
verting the contestant choristers into statuary and freez¬ 
ing them to silence. On which, as if at last accepting 
these evidences as sufficient subscription to his office, the 
verger stooped and with a not too hasty hand undid the 
lock. 

5 

Only the lights above the choir-stalls were burning. 
The great nave, yawning illimitably beyond, seemed as if 
cut off from the chancel ogive by a velvet pall. Pulpit 
and brass lectern were wrapped in calico, that imparted 
to the familiar contours swelling beneath these pallid cov¬ 
erlets the vague immensity of the unseen. The church 
was a vast repository of whispers. The dropping of a 
hymnbook multiplied itself startlingly throughout the in¬ 
terminable building like the clapping of dead and apa¬ 
thetic hands. Coughs prolonged themselves into a chain 
of dismal groans as if the spirits were in pain. Not a 
sound within the chancel but was challenged by a dozen 
sounds beyond. It seemed the dread occupants of the 
outer tombs and mouldy crypts below were gathered all 
together to attend the practice. Oswald, feeling how in¬ 
adequate were the powers of one gentleman to cope with 
such forces as these, shivered in his heart to think the 
verger had occupied this church alone, before yet Light 
was. 


THE CHORISTER 


99 


Now, in quick succession, the heavy echoes of the vestry 
latch resounded through the church as belated choristers 
trooped in, hot and breathy. The verger, immobile 
against the sanctuary, propped up from the altar-rail 
with an arm, turned his austere profile towards the vestry 
and fixed each newcomer with a look of interdiction that 
would have deterred any but a chorister, and checked even 
those. The harmonium, dislodged from its lair behind 
the organ by two of the senior boys, was borne into the 
chancel and deposited before the shrouded lectern under 
its layer of weekly dust. The psalter and hymnbooks, 
stacked chin-high like a pile of plates in a waiter’s arms, 
were distributed throughout the choir, violently snatched 
at and fought for in transit, and much used about the 
head and person; old copies being repudiated and forcibly 
exchanged for new; new copies being rapidly converted 
into old through the heat with which their ownership was 
contested. 

“That’ll do now!” the verger’s voice declared. “I’ve 
told you once. Next time I’ve got to address any of you 
it’ll be digital.” The organist’s factotum, or right-hand 
man, appearing in the chancel during this sally, tendered 
to the indignant Prestwich a mild and ingratiatory “good 
evening.” 

“I won’t have it,” the verger said, ignoring the saluta¬ 
tion as below the level of his outraged dignity, and an 
infringement on authority during the active discharge of 
itself. “And so you know. If there’s any recurrence of 
it, out you go. That’s my Dictum. It’s quite immacu¬ 
late to me Who you are. I’m not going to waste my time 
with you.” 

The folds of this ample indignation being momentarily 
relaxed as if Prestwich were on the point of disrobing in¬ 
jured dignity, the factotum found encouragement to re¬ 
new his greeting: “Good evening, Mr. Prestwich,” to 


100 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


which the verger recognizing the voice and deeming it of 
insufficient consequence to justify the least modification 
of his demeanour, contributed an abbreviated “evening,” 
that sounded more like a reproof to interruption than an 
acknowledgment of courtesy. 

“And so I’ve told you,” he repeated. “I’ve told you 
all. I’m responsible for the preservation of this fabric 
and the behaviour of everybody in it and I won’t stand 
the least dereliction of my office—not from the Arch¬ 
bishop himself.” Saying which and decided more by the 
impediment of his refractory organ than by any satis¬ 
faction of an authority vindicated, he returned to the 
sanctuary, where he took up a position commanding the 
choirstalls in readiness to reassert himself again if 
necessary. 

Meanwhile the organist’s factotum laid on the harmon¬ 
ium the heavy parcel of church music wrapped up in 
brown paper, with which he had arrived encumbered, and 
taking ingenious advantage of the verger’s authority, 
grafted his own upon it (though in a voice carefully mod¬ 
ulated so as not to compete with what the irate verger 
said) telling the boys; “Order, now!” and “Silence!” in a 
sort of apologetic undertone, obviously fearful lest Prest- 
wich might resent anything suggestive of an infringement 
of his rights. 

He was a lean and awkward youth, in an overcoat too 
small for him. By occupation he was a clerk in the Rail¬ 
way Mineral Office but by predilection he was an organist, 
and in a tentative and surreptitious sort of way his hair 
struggled to express this aspiring part in him by a re¬ 
dundancy about the neck, albeit the chief effect produced 
on the unmusical who viewed him from behind consisted in 
a certain greasiness of collar. Towards the end of every 
six weeks or so this opulence of lock became most notice¬ 
able; but provincial barbers unacquainted with the lives 


THE CHORISTER 


101 


and habits of the Great Masters, are an unimaginative 
race, and at the end of this period he would appear one 
night at the practice with his hat sunk down to his ac¬ 
centuated ears; a neck so shorn and meagre as to suggest 
decline, and, thus transmogrified would begin his painful 
progress to musicianship from the bottom of the ladder 
once again. In return for musical instruction of a loose 
and interrupted sort he served as Mr. Rencil’s vade- 
mecum and handy-man; mended the church music; wrote 
some of the more formal of the organist’s letters; kept 
the choir books and did those semi-menial services which 
are prone to tumble to the lot of enthusiasm—enthusiasm 
being frequently no more than Folly, bound in calf and 
glorified with gilt edges. At times, sustained by the 
illusion of having an organ lesson, he would blow for the 
organist during a whole evening, and copy out tattered 
voluntaries into the late night hours as an aid to the 
understanding of musical composition. To his friends, 
or rather to such of them as had no contact with the 
choir, he spoke of himself occasionally as Choir Master 
and Deputy Organist. But he was in reality neither of 
these, although he fulfilled the servile offices of both, carry¬ 
ing all the heavier music to and from the organist’s house, 
bearing urgent messages to the Vicarage, running errands^ 
and supplementing the blower’s services when required. 

At unimportant week-night services he did, indeed, 
deputize on the organ bench occasionally, perspiring 
minims out of his forehead, and touching sundry pedals 
with a tentative and cautious toe as if they were explo¬ 
sives. But he was seen to greatest advantage when un¬ 
locking the panels of the console with the key his master 
had entrusted to him for the purpose; or when, with pro¬ 
found understanding, he pushed all the stops home after 
the concluding voluntary. 

Having this evening unlocked the organ and made im- 


102 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


pressive and judicial selection of stops for the Master’s 
use, he put up the humble harmonium lid and drew forth 
the white wood baton from its place of repose on the black 
keys in readiness for Mr. Rencil’s use, and first tapping 
the music desk for the surreptitious indulgence of his own 
authority, besought the choristers to find the psalms fof 
Sunday. 

“The Psalms for Sunday!” he proclaimed in a voice 
so startlingly imitative of the absent organist as to bring 
the blushes up to his very hair. Anxious to expunge this 
flagrant act of plagiarism he added in tones by contrast 
supplicative and contrite: “Come along now. Don’t 
let’s waste any more time. Mr. Rencil will be here in a 
minute!” 


6 

Amid the ruffling of psalter leaves and the clapping of 
heads with them, and facetious appeals to the Deputy: 

“Please Mester Wembling, what day’ll next Sunday 
be?” succeeded by such stereotyped replies as “Good 
Friday,” “Bank Holiday,” “the forty-fifth of last Jan¬ 
uary,” with their consequent retaliations and the dex¬ 
terous doubling up of psalters too confidingly held open 
in unwary hands—all of which, under cover of disposing 
his own pages the deputy tactfully ignored; taking pen¬ 
cil notes of the chants and hymn tunes from the rough 
copy drawn from his breast pocket in the organist’s 
handwriting—the Organist himself arrived. 

His approach, between the clicking of the great latch 
and his appearance in the chancel, was sufficiently notified 
to the observant by the transformation in the verger’s 
demeanour, who, having first fastened on the vestry door 
a gaze of renewed and concentrated displeasure in prep¬ 
aration for some flushed and guilty head, exchanged this 


THE CHORISTER 


103 


and his stony attitude for an alert and welcoming posture 
as if at last he found himself confronted with a presence 
worthy of his recognition. 

Mr. Rencil came accompanied by two boys, sons of the 
doctor and of the lawyer respectively, each of whom bore 
a Grammar School cap in his hand; a dog-eared much 
dismembered mortarboard that Oswald’s eyes instinctively 
looked for and rested on with a gratification almost 
possessive. To the paid and corduroyed choristers this 
mortarboard constituted an object of envy and traditional 
hate. To Oswald it was an object of soulful emulation; 
a bond of learning and gentility. ‘Some day—that dim, 
delectable some day awaiting wistfully its turn behind the 
throng and pressure of these more competitive, immediate 
days, like Oswald’s self behind the crush of ruder selves 
that dispossessed him—he was to wear such a cap, and 
go to such a school, and acquire great wisdom, and make 
himself worthy of the best of fathers. Some day, too, he 
was to have music lessons from the organist of St. 
Saviour’s, whom both as chorister and prospective pupil 
his loyalty proclaimed a musician without parallel, whilst 
his love, shyly disguised beneath its very yearning for 
expression, vested him with every virtue. The kindliness 
of the organist’s eyes, the gentle droop of his brown 
moustache, the attractive softness of his voice, the sym¬ 
pathetic friendliness of his hand—all stirred Oswald’s 
affections to a degree of unspeakable devotion. For this 
worshipped hand, so smooth, so white, so marvellously 
certain of its way and whereabouts upon the keys, had 
rested more than once on Oswald’s shoulder, as it rested 
now on the shoulder of the doctor’s son—who lived (this 
latter) at the double brass plate in Hill Street where the 
empty medicine bottles went up the long passage to the 
red lamp overhanging a door at the end of it, coughing 
dreadfully, some of them, when Oswald was on his rounds 


104 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


at night; and came down filled, withdrawing their corks 
and exchanging sniffs and trial drinks with one another, 
as Oswald had himself observed and greatly wondered at. 
And the organist’s eyes, through the large lenses that 
seemed to liquefy and soften them, had rested on Oswald’s 
own with a tenderness not often to be met with in the 
eyes of men. One night, never to be forgotten, he had 
actually overtaken Oswald beneath the lamp-post that 
spread its parsimonious light on Canon Quexley’s steps, 
and had (to the confusion of Oswald’s wildest hopes) not 
only recognized but walked with him as far as the vestry 
door. Inspired by which stimulating memory Oswald 
ever took the same way, and gazed at the organist’s 
window with an intensity that was already half a prayer. 

Mr. Rencil called him “Oswald” too, as he called by 
their Christian names the doctor and lawyer’s sons. It 
was a tribute to gentility, and the proud distinction of 
volunteers. The paid choristers who thrust forth their 
predatory hands each quarter’s end for the jangling hire 
that the deputy dropped into them, were unmitigated 
“Smiths” and “Higginsons,” and “Browns” and “But¬ 
lers,” and so on uniformly through the mercenary list of 
surnames. But, this distinction apart, no differentiation 
marked the organist’s treatment of his choir. To all 
alike he showed the same kind smile, the same enlarged 
and lenient eye, the same soft voice. Even to the shoulders 
of the surnames his hand was not a stranger; and yet— 
with, peradventure, the sole exception of the Canon’s self 
—there was no presence whose mere approach drew the 
choir to a prompter recollection of decorum. As he came 
down the chancel with a comprehensive smile of greeting, 
he stopped before the little Oswald, dutifully erect with 
his psalter held before him and his lips pursed to atten¬ 
tion, and took him playfully by the ear. 

“Oswald, you rogue, you weren’t at the practice last 


THE CHORISTER 105 

Friday. In the end we had to begin without you. Why 
was that?” 

A voice suggested: “It was Mayor’s Party.” 
Another voice contemptuously said: “Think he was at 
Mayor’s Party?” Neither of these two voices was 
Oswald’s. Realizing his embarrassment Mr. Rencil re¬ 
leased the boy’s ear with the gentlest shake of reassurance, 
and turned to Oswald’s neighbour, distinguished by a 
crimson flannel wrapping round his neck. 

“Now Hopwood, how’s the throat going on? Ought 
you to be singing? I see you have it bandaged still.” 
So, with a word to one or other he approached the deputy 
and addressed himself to the work in hand. 

The practice began. The deputy seated himself upon 
the blower’s rush-bottomed chair, brought from the 
blower’s gloomy purlieus behind the organ, whose de¬ 
pressed seat had been raised to harmonium height by the 
expedient of old church books and tattered voluntaries. 
Mr. Rencil tapped the instrument lightly with his tapered 
baton. It breathed a bronchial response beneath the 
pressure of the deputy’s feet. They soared into the 
psalms for Sunday. From time to time the organist 
accentuated the pointing with his baton on the choir 
ledges or rapped the music into silence at some blunder 
too palpable for pardon, such as an aitchless “Holy” or a 
mispronounced word. At other moments he strayed 
towards the altar, and even wandered down into the 
darkling nave—far beyond the range of Oswald’s fearful 
eyes—sublimely unconscious of the unseen terrors lurk¬ 
ing in it, from whose profundity his corrective voice 
emerged, trailing a train of stupefying echoes as if a cab 
were lumbering up the aisle. Meanwhile, sundry of the 
senior singers also sauntered in by ones and twos, with 
the leisureliness befitting honorary members. Their 
attendance—save on those special occasions when Mr. 


106 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Rencil requested it—was subject to no such invidious rule 
of punctuality as brought so many of the choristers to 
practice in a perspiration, whilst their conduct at re¬ 
hearsal was exempt from the harassing restrictions laid 
upon the juniors in front. During the psalms and can¬ 
ticles it was their privilege to remain seated, alternately 
singing and reverently discussing the latest news among 
themselves, such as murders, elections and starting 
prices, and occasionally dropping an admonitory hymn- 
book on the head of some chorister so unmindful of the 
respect due to Mr. Rencil and his Maker as to cease sing¬ 
ing and lend his ears and open mouth to a conversation 
not concerning him. Most of these newcomers were 
obviously arrived at an age when their voices, in the lyric 
sense, could be of small service to God, but they helped to 
fill the surplices on Sunday, even if they added nothing 
substantial to the singing. They still retained, however, 
the impressive habit of clearing their throats as though 
the whole responsibility of choral service hung upon 
them, and speaking in the historic present of a vocal 
organ nobody ever heard. Still, as church was the only 
place where their singing would have been tolerated, they 
clung to it with the persistence of a worthless husband to 
a good wife, and were more regular attendants than the 
better singers to whom the world at large offered a wider 
sphere of temptations. These arrived later, usually to¬ 
wards anthem time, with the dissimulated consequence of 
Festival soloists, smoothing their hair and pulling down 
their waistcoats as if in preparation for the platform. 
All of them were united in their esteem of Mr. Rencil, for 
whose personal attentions they vied, and in a general way 
the choir practice was more regarded as an opportunity 
for social intercourse and the interchange of words and 
smiles with the organist of St. Saviour’s than as a means 
of perfecting praise for the worship of heaven—in which 


THE CHORISTER 


107 


department not a few considered themselves proficient 
enough already. To-night the chief topic of conversa¬ 
tion appeared to centre in the health of Alderman 
Bankett not the husband, but the father-in-law, of the 
Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew—who occupied a 
detached house along the Hunmouth Road, and had been 
dangerously ill for some days. Taking advantage of a 
lull in the singing Mr. Rencil turned to ask the men if 
there were any further tidings of the alderman’s condition. 
One had heard nothing since midday; another understood 
the alderman was sinking; a third shook his head. 
“There’s bark in front of the house,” interpolated one of 
the choirboys (not Oswald) suddenly. All eyes turned 
upon the speaker. 

“When was that?” asked one of the seniors, judicially. 

“To-night,” answered the boy. “Ever so deep . . . 
You could kick it.” 

“There’s been bark there this two days,” said another 
of the men, indifferently. “That’s nothing to go by.” 

“It’s a bad sign, is bark,” commented the judicial mem¬ 
ber. “A very bad sign. When it comes to bark 
for anybody. . . . I’m very sorry. It’s generally 
fatal.” 

They were on the point of resuming the interrupted 
singing when the vestry latch snapped heavily again and 
a heated chorister, holding his cap screwed tightly in both 
hands as if he were wringing water out of it, came swiftly 
into view. For his composure’s sake this entry coincided 
with an inauspicious moment. Mr. Rencil, glancing at 
his watch and then turning his thoughtful eyes through 
their gold-rimmed lenses upon the delinquent, said in a 
voice whose unaltered softness lacked nothing of reproach¬ 
ful severity: 

“You are late to-night, Anderson. How is that?” 

Without directly answering this question, but wringing 


108 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


his cap the harder and sliding into place amidst his fel¬ 
lows, the chorister was heard to say: 

“Alderman Bankett’s dead.” 

Before the chancel could recover from the effect pro¬ 
duced by this portentous tidings, the verger—reappearing 
dramatically before the altar rails—gave out in an im¬ 
pressive voice: 

“It is my painful obligation to announce that Alderman 
Bankett passed away at 7.45. His death removes one of 
the oldest members of the Corporation from our midst, 
and his demise will be a conspicuous deprivation to the 
Council.” 

This tribute to the defunct Alderman was ceremonial 
solely—Prestwich’s private estimation of the late Aider- 
man Bankett (whom he stigmatized as an upstart of no 
Vocabulary) being well known. 

The late delinquent, regaining assurance in the sudden 
alternation of a demeanour occasioned by his news, and 
seeking to wrest back some of the popularity unscrupu¬ 
lously appropriated by the verger, took advantage of a 
nasal stoppage on the latter’s part to exclaim: 

“Bell’s ringing for him now. You can hear it.” 

7 

Almost to a man the choir drew its breath and listened. 
After a while there dropped into the breath-held stillness 
of the church a dull and leaden sound; the portentous 
slow pulse of St. Gyles’s passing bell. All were visibly 
impressed, but none so profoundly as the little Oswald, 
who clasped his book as if it had been a mother’s hand 
and listened, open-mouthed and silenced, to the solemn 
knell that went through his small frame like a throb from 
eternity’s heart, accompanied with vague shapes of police¬ 
men and blood-smeared men and infirmaries and dark 


THE CHORISTER 


109 


ways home. His own heart reciprocated the throb, and 
his lips shaped themselves to the unspoken word “Dead!” 
The word had a deep significance for him. Alderman 
Bankett, whom he did not know, was Dead. The news 
was terrible. What tidings for his mother. Instantly 
he wished the practice over that he might hasten the proud 
moment of breaking it to her. 

The punctuation of the bell, like a full stop awaited, 
released all these captive breaths which, growing more 
audible and more difficult of repression, broke out in 
coughs and converse. Alderman Bankett, though of late 
an infrequent worshipper by reason of infirmity, had in 
earlier days paid pew-rent at St. Saviour’s. His son— 
the husband of that Mrs. Bankett in St. Lawrence Square 
whom Osw r ald and everybody knew—was one of the pres¬ 
ent churchwardens, and formed a familiar feature of the 
service, walking on Sunday behind a stiff outstretched 
arm holding an offertory plate. The Alderman’s death 
involved considerations for St. Saviour’s. 

“I suppose, Sir,” said Mr. Blenkinsop the Rate Col¬ 
lector, half rising from his seat and addressing the 
Organist, “I suppose, Sir, we shall have the privilege of 
the Dead March on Sunday?” 

For nearly forty years Mr. Blenkinsop had monopolized 
a place in St. Saviour’s choir on the strength of an 
apocryphal voice, to which he administered the pitch by 
means of a pipe kept in his waistcoat pocket for the pur¬ 
pose, as if he fed it from a bottle, and sustained on lozen¬ 
ges that disseminated a melancholy odour of paregoric 
through the chancel when he sucked them. By virtue of 
this pitch pipe, and these lozenges, Mr. Blenkinsop (with 
due respect to the organist of St. Saviour’s, whose word 
he held sacred, and whose utterances, humbly assimilated 
to-day, were re-issued as expressions of his own authority 
to-morrow) Mr. Blenkinsop based his claim to musical 


110 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


consideration. Mr. Rencil, turning his thoughtful 
glasses upon the Rate Collector said he assumed that the 
Dead March would enter into the service on Sunday. 

“Morning and evening, Sir?” enquired the Rate 
Collector eagerly. 

“We can spare an alderman or two,” he declared, “for 
the Dead March.” He wished to make clear that it was 
the March in Saul he meant. “None of your Mendels¬ 
sohns or Beethovens!” he exclaimed emphatically. 
“They aren’t in it, Sir. They haven’t the grandeur. 
They don’t go through you. But Handel’s different. 
That’s what I call Sublime Music. We can’t have too 
much of it. It’s an education. It’s a Sermon. It'lays 
hold of a man. After he’s heard that he can go back to 
his Sunday dinner with something to think about.” 

Questions were raised, too, concerning anthems; and 
the spirits of the choir rose visibly to discussion of ser¬ 
vices in This and That. Somebody in F, and Somebody 
in D, and Somebody (jocosely) in L—which drew the 
accustomed draft of small-beer laughter from the stalls. 
In the midst of these deliberations the figure of Prestwich 
suddenly appeared, dusting both palms together as if 
applauding his own entry, who, drawing confidentially 
near enough to Mr. Rencil in order that a whisper, 
guided adroitly by a hand, might reach the organist’s ear, 
announced in a voice partaking of the quality of a whisper 
only in the outward manner of its delivery: 

“The Canon’s coming, Sir.” 

He added, in tones of as much injury as the need for 
haste allowed, “He says the main gates is to be opened 
of a Friday, now. Just in case he wants to use ’em. He 
can’t fiddle about with side walks, he says. First it’s 
Lock this one; then it’s Lock that one; then it’s Lock ’em 
all. Now it’s Leave ’em all open. There’s no materia 
medica about his goings on. He’s too ultramontane 


THE CHORISTER 111 

to be argued with. That’s what’s the matter with him. 
I’m about . . . Here he comes!” 

The apparition of the Vicar of St. Saviour’s at a choir 
practice, albeit a contingency to be reckoned with, was 
rare. Accepting his ignorance of music as sufficient 
proof of the art’s inferiority, Canon Quexley concerned 
himself little with the choral disposition of St. Saviour’s 
worship but left this matter largely in the hands of Mr. 
Rencil. From time to time, as an act of policy, he showed 
himself within the church on Friday, to encourage effort 
and stimulate attendance, but such musical questions as 
were referred to him on these occasions were briefly dealt 
with, the Canon betraying no great desire to dwell on 
matters so far below his comprehension. But that his 
presence imposed a fresh criterion of conduct was evident 
by the behaviour of the choir. The choristers assumed an 
upright posture, taking their books in both hands. The 
smiles still lingering on the men’s faces were extinguished 
like surreptitious candles in a school dormitory. The 
Deputy dropped his under lip and expressed respect by a 
lowering of facial intelligence. The Rate Collector, after 
a moment’s hesitation, rose to his feet; the others limply 
following. 


8 

The Canon came into view from behind the choir ves¬ 
try, still wearing his hat, which as he passed before the 
altar rails he solemnly removed. He advanced with a 
careful and calculated tread; a tread deliberately posited 
like the premise of a syllogism, for use in consecrated 
places and on ceremonious occasions. Within the fabric, 
indeed, he walked as he spoke; weighing each step as if it 
were a word, and lifting up his eyes from alternate feet 
to heaven and down again, as though in conversation with 


112 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


higher powers. An Inverness cape amplified his portly 
person with its voluminous folds, one wing of which (ex¬ 
posing its silken lining) lay negligently retroverted on a 
shoulder. In the matter of profiles he showed inferior 
to Prestwich, who in this respect at least might have 
changed places with his vicar not at all to the church’s 
disadvantage. He lacked Prestwich’s classic nose and 
chiselled nostrils; his own. organ being blunted by a cer¬ 
tain flaccidity. The bile-tinted cheeks, somewhat pouched 
and baglike, shook as he walked, and the folds of his neck 
overhung his Roman collar. But his forehead, most 
catliedrally domed, reflected the choirlights from its 
gleaming surface, with the intensity of a halo. He 
coughed, on coming between the choir stalls, with a 
resonant cough suggesting crypt-like depths of dignity 
and understanding; a cough of purpose rather than ne¬ 
cessity ; the very verger of a cough, imbued with the im¬ 
portance of what it portended, and the function it served. 
And it served, too, in some sort as an indirect acknowledg¬ 
ment of the choir, which—save for this and a grave in¬ 
clination of the head, as if some stranger had saluted 
him—he did not explicitly notice. His countenance re¬ 
laxed as little to the expression of social amenity as his 
cape; both, indeed, being rather utilized to eliminate the 
human element from his person as a thing calculated to 
compromise dignity and prejudice rank. In his official 
dealings with the world he bestowed smiles sparingly, and 
certainly discouraged any interchange of them with the 
choir, which he condescended to acknowledge purely as an 
abstraction, like sin, in which convenient form it might be 
apprehended by the intellect without any derogatory 
passage through the organs of sight,—these approaches 
to his private person, indeed, being kept discreetly cur¬ 
tained against intrusion, like the vicarage windows look¬ 
ing on the street, behind whose panes it was but rarely 


THE CHORISTER 


113 


pedestrians might catch a glimpse of his canonical head. 
They were cold eyes, of a steely colour and a metallic 
hardness, that seemed as if capable of calculating the 
small currency of life to a ha’penny; being by nature 
more adapted to compute figures than subserve rapture. 
In unguarded moments, as he spoke or listened, it was 
noticeable that they strayed from his control like children 
from the vigilance of a governess, to busy themselves with 
increasing interest in external trifles—such as boots and 
shoes and ties and watch-chains and partings in the hair 
—until, coming at length into direct collision with other 
eyes not less active and enquiring than themselves, they 
were peremptorily recalled and withdrawn from inter¬ 
course behind their fleshy lids as if these had been the 
governess’s flounces. 

As he drew near to Mr. Rencil (whom alone he 
recognized or greeted) it was observable that he held the 
pince-nez in his ungloved right hand; a white and flabby 
hand whose etiolated flesh suggested too much seclusion 
from sun and air, reminding Oswald irresistibly of the 
waxen pork exposed to view in Waxford’s shop. Mr. 
Rencil, receiving the august visitor with a look of pleas¬ 
ant, mild enquiry, adverted to the recent tidings, saying 
he was sorry to hear . . . The Canon, with a remote 
crimping of his eyes and a slight action of the hand and 
pince-nez, indicative not precisely of impatience, but of an 
understanding of all the considerations involved in this 
topic, too complete for words, assented. 

. . To-night. At 7-45. Yes, yes. It was to be 
expected . . . And now, with regard to Sunday . . .” 

No words were expended in reference to the late 
Alderman’s virtues. It might have been, for any allusion 
made to the subject, that he had not any. The Canon 
dropped his voice to an introspective murmur that taxed 
(as it was designed to do) the ears of the listening choir, 


114 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


who, though obviously not included in the conversation 
assumed an intelligent part in it for their credit’s sake. 
Stray words of confabulation escaped. 

“The interment . . . Most probably the Corporation 
. . . With regard to Sunday . . 

Here the Rate Collector, whose mouth opened each 
time the conversation blew his way, in a desire to vindicate 
his forty years’ membership, believed he had entrapped 
the Canon’s elusive eye at last. He seized the moment to 
clap a retentive supposition on it, saying: 

“I suppose, Sir . . 

The supposition fell with strange abruptness as if a 
hymnbook had fallen on the chancel tiles. The Canon, 
seemingly aware of some intrusive sound, but blank as to 
the source of it, turned pained enquiring eyebrows on the 
organist as though seeking confirmation and enlighten¬ 
ment. Mr. Rencil interpreted the Rate Collector’s peti¬ 
tion, whereupon, deigning to acknowledge it from this of¬ 
ficial source, the Canon answered: 

“To be sure. To be sure.” 

“To be sure . . . the dead march on Sunday, Mr. 
Blenkinsop,” the organist transmitted. “So that will set 
your mind at rest,” he added with a smile. 

“Morning and evening, Sir?” the Collector summoned 
confidence to ask, in a voice of larger assurance by virtue 
of what had been conceded to it. Once more, the question 
was referred to the Canon’s ear and the canonical murmur 
vouchsafed acquiescence, saying: “Certainly . . . Cer¬ 
tainly.” Then, as though feeling that some small com¬ 
ment might at this juncture without impropriety be com¬ 
mitted to the choir, he said in a voice addressed to nobody 
in particular, but dedicated to the service of all: “The 
late Alderman was for some years associated with this 
church.” 

A vague murmur, apparently appreciative, rose up 


THE CHORISTER 


115 


like incense from the choir stalls at this communication. 
Many of the members were obviously engaged in thinking 
what remark they might contribute with prestige to them¬ 
selves. One said: “Ah! It’s a sad affair to be sure. 
A very sad affair!” with his face saddened to the expres¬ 
sion he judged most creditable to his own sentiments and 
most appropriate to the Vicar. Other members, not to 
be outdone, threw in touching contributions to the sadness 
of Alderman Bankett’s death, like coins to the collecting 
plate, feeling the eye of the church upon them. The Tax 
Collector, thinking it his turn once more, assumed a deeply 
moralizing attitude and voice, and depositing his hand 
upon the book he sang from, as though to attest religious 
truth, declared: 

“It’s what we must all be prepared for when it pleases 
the Almighty to call us.” 

If this show of devout submission were intended to 
recommend the speaker on the grounds of piety to the 
canonical ear, it only showed that Mr. Blenkinsop’s forty 
years’ experience of pitch-pipes and paregoric lozenges 
within this sacred edifice had been in vain. The name of 
the Deity, coming from secular lips, brought to Canon 
Quexley not comfort but a manifest uneasiness verging 
on apprehension. Already the extending area of the 
conversation had imparted a restless movement to his 
glasses and a certain instability to his feet. Wincing 
under the name of the Lord—as a doctor might do under 
receipt of a prescription for his cough, tendered by some 
misguided patient—he raised his canonical hat with an 
impulse almost suggesting for one moment that he meant 
to put it on; regarded its outer and inner surfaces, and 
moved in an atmosphere of exclusive meditation towards 
the altar. This fit of deep abstraction having brought 
him safely out of range of the Tax Collector and any in¬ 
discreet deities he stopped, gazed fixedly at his feet and 


116 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


at his pince-nez, still out-held, and said over his shoulder: 

“Of course . . . Mr. Rencil . . 

The sentence was not completed. In its unterminated 
state it furnished an implicate request for the Organist’s 
ear. 

“Of course, Mr. Rencil . . .” the Canon said again, 
and balancing his pince-nez began to move once more 
towards the altar. Canon and organist, engaging in a 
conversation of greater freedom as they left the choir, 
passed out of sight towards the vestry door, followed by 
Prestwich—who, all this while, had not been idle, but 
associating himself with the canonical person by a stu¬ 
dious propinquity, as if the canon’s rank were incomplete 
without him, had addressed various menacing, intense and 
expostulatory gestures towards the junior choristers, 
commanding them in irate whispers to “stand up” “turn 
your head round,” “cease talking there,” and “be still.” 

With the conclusive snapping of the vestry latch and 
Mr. Rencil’s return, it was as if a great blanket had been 
lifted from the spirits of the choir. All were sensible of 
the honour conferred by the Canon’s visit—which they 
might now enjoy at leisure, freed from the constraints 
and responsibilities his presence imposed. Mr. Rencil 
announced that the first part of the funeral service for the 
deceased Alderman would probably take place at St. 
Saviour’s—though the alderman was to be interred at the 
Cemetery—and in this case he might have to ask for the 
assistance of the choir. The interment was provisionally 
arranged for Tuesday. Would those who thought they 
could conveniently be present put up their hands? 

Various hands, of various sizes and complexions, were 
lifted into the prominence of the choirlights, some tenta¬ 
tively, others—perhaps ashamed of the spectacle they 
presented, or repenting a too rapid decision—were, after 
hesitation, withdrawn. Oswald, not too certain in his 


THE CHORISTER 


117 


mind what it was that was being demanded of these hands, 
and a prey to the politeness that shrinks from the least 
assertion of self, did not raise his own hand with the rest, 
albeit offering the organist a timid and beseeching eye. 
But Mr. Rencil, counting up the erect palms and finding 
their number few, appealed to him by name, asking if he 
did not think his mother would spare him on Tuesday. 
Thrilled with this direct appeal, and burning with the 
loyal desire to concede any service that Mr. Rencil might 
require of him, Oswald answered in an undertone “he 
thought she would.” The organist turned his smile upon 
the Rate Collector. “I’m afraid it’s no use my asking 
you , Mr. Blenkinsop!” 

“If it’s to be the Dead March in Saul, Sir,” said the 
Rate Collector—first to the organist, and then to every 
face in turn of which the choir was composed,—“there’s 
nothing will keep me away.” 


BOOK IV 


THE ALDERMAN 

1 

C OMING or sedately going on his various errands 
about the town, the little Oswald had occasion 
frequently to pass a large buff-painted building 
in the High Gate that stood out with imposing dignity 
from the adjoining red brick shops and business premises; 
touching shoulders with them, and yet for all its contigu¬ 
ity aloof and consciously detached, like a constable in a 
crowd; its spacious breast confronting the ancient Piet 
Gate, down which it gazed towards the Market Place out 
of bland and lofty windows with a look at once self satis¬ 
fied and serene. This was the Mansion House. 

Above the curtain of faded red moreen that lent 
municipal discretion to the lower panes of one of the 
windows flanking the square, flagged vestibule, the little 
Oswald had glimpsed in passing, with awe for a spectacle 
not commonly revealed to youth, the tops of human 
heads. Venerable, bald and grey-haired heads, for the 
most part, of an amplitude larger than normal. These 
were the heads of the City Fathers in council assembled. 
The City Fathers, too, in their complete embodiment 
Oswald had occasionally seen, mounting the broad steps 
to the Mansion House, or descending gravely to the 
street. As befitted the standard set up by their heads and 
the spacious edifice in which they met, they seemed to be 
a bigger breed of men, as if municipality required a lar¬ 
ger race of representatives to serve her. Some of them 
wore suits of substantial broadcloth and shining chimney- 


THE ALDERMAN 


119 


pot hats, and boots wonderfully broad. Their move¬ 
ments were deliberate to the point of being august. They 
walked in knots of twos and threes, their hands behind 
their backs, their heads inclined to a common centre, 
conversing earnestly in undertones and throwing out be¬ 
fore each other’s eyes from time to time their open palms 
and outspread fingers. Upon their broad shoulders the 
whole burden of a borough seemed imposed. It was plain 
to every onlooker that some vital interest to Daneborough 
hung in the balance—such as a pump or lamp-post, or the 
mayor’s Port wine. 

Among these gravely ponderating groups in earlier 
days, and even in the days of Oswald’s wonderment— 
though more rarely, by reason of his growing infirmity 
—the late lamented alderman had formed a frequent 
figure, beneath the historic silk hat that had dispensed its 
lustre during three terms of mayoral office, and been 
doffed as many times to royalty. His massive shoulders 
sloped grandiosely under the frock-coat of imperishable 
broadcloth that survived him after more than thirty 
years of civic sun and rain. His dictatorial cough 
betokened him a street away, as if a loosened tile had 
crashed to earth. It made the ceiling of the Council 
chamber ring, and left noises as of church bells in the 
heads of listeners unprepared, and formed the alderman’s 
curt substitute for “No” to every applicant, and sole 
answer to every question where the spoken negative, im¬ 
plying courtesy, might savour of weakness. This was 
the same cough that killed him, which lends force to the 
adage that a good servant makes a bad master. In the 
Council chamber and in his business it did the work of a 
more fluent advocate. It crushed opposition; it dis¬ 
couraged hope. But it presumed at length upon the 
confidence reposed in it. It grew from humble beginnings, 
like its one-time master, to aldermanic proportions. It 


120 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


disputed his authority. It contradicted him flatly at 
street corners and in public places, and coughed him down, 
so that breathless and impotent he must lean upon his 
stick, or prop himself with a hand against a wall. How 
or where he had made acquaintance with this despotic 
partner, nobody rightly knows. But it seems first to 
have come into public prominence in the very Market of 
whose committee he was uncompromising chairman when 
he died. There were burgesses who remembered it in the 
struggling days of both of them, attendant on an open 
stall in the Market Place, of such unprepossessing and 
promiscuous nature as to bid defiance both to hope and 
definition. This stall, scowling beneath a home-made 
canopy for protection from the elements, exposed such 
disconnected goods as smoked and flattened herrings; 
socks and calico; cabbages and onions; bottles of ink; 
pens and potatoes; eggs and sometimes chickens. 
Whether, therefore, the deceased alderman was at this 
time a greengrocer, fishmonger, hosier or stationer, must 
be left for later biographers to decide. In all likelihood 
the stall marked already a stage in the Bankettian evolu¬ 
tion, being the apotheosis of a pedlar’s basket. But it 
is from this period that dates his association with his¬ 
tory, and that his cough began to make itself felt in the 
municipal life of the town. As the obituarist of the 
Daneborough Mercury said in a memoir which, even at 
the present day, can still claim to be the most important 
contribution to posterity on the subject of Alderman 
Bankett: 

“. . . It was doubtless here (i. e. at his stall in the 
Market Place) that the deceased gentleman first acquired 
his profound and intricate knowledge of public life and 
character which stood the Council chamber in such stead 
in later years, and was given so ungrudgingly to the serv¬ 
ice of the Borough.” 


THE ALDERMAN 


121 


As senior alderman, the death of Isaac Bankett was 
municipally held to be an event of deepest significance 
to the town, calling for public commemoration—not 
alone out of respect to the dead, concerning whom in his 
private capacity members of the council preserved their 
own opinions, but out of respect to the living. That is to 
say, out of respect to the bleeding body corporate from 
which this limb had been so tragically torn. Theoret- 
ically, the town was thrown into mourning. On Sunday 
the bells of St. Gyles’s rang a muffled peal. Hymns and 
anthems were selected with appropriate regard to the 
memory of the dead alderman. All the spiritual leaders 
of the town, pressing gregariously on each other’s heels, 
filled their respective pulpits with mortuary bleatings, 
stimulated by the fear of rival oratory, and striving in 
their rhetoric to outdo rather than be outdone. Morning 
and evening the organs of most of the churches emitted the 
solemn march, the congregations standing, and on the 
Tuesday that was to see the mortal remains of Isaac 
Bankett committed to the vault prepared for them in the 
big cemetery, the town awoke with a thrill of expectancy 
as for a circus or a Race Day. All through the morning 
wreaths and crosses in brown cardboard boxes threaded 
the streets of Daneborough from every florist in the town, 
and handed themselves in at the late alderman’s side door. 
As the hour advanced the public ways and thoroughfares 
began to darken with silk hats and other sombre habil¬ 
iments of woe, all making for the Mansion House. 

Here every blind was drawn. The great door, thrown 
open, its ancient brass knocker bound lugubriously in a 
crape bow, yawned like a sepulchre. Two constables, with 
the solemnity of monumental effigies, kept guard on each 
side of the broad stone steps, bringing up their arms in a 
grave salute as members of the corporation passed be¬ 
tween them. Within the sepulchre, wearing his gold chain 


122 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of office that encircled his broad neck and swung against 
his massive dewlap like the label on a prize bull, the Mayor 
received the aldermen and councillors, and the delegates 
from neighbouring boroughs and public bodies, with many 
more of Daneborough’s elect who, on one ground or an¬ 
other, associated themselves with the corporate state on 
such ceremonial occasions as saw refreshment laid out on 
the Mayor’s sideboard. Behind the lowered blind of the 
Mayor’s parlour, in the gloom made more gloomy by three 
dim oil paintings of departed worthies, that loomed ob¬ 
scurely out of their gilded frames upon its walls, blink¬ 
ing in the premature and pallid illumination dispensed by 
the gaslit chandelier, all the assembled faces wore an un¬ 
living look, as if the sickly light were itself defunct day¬ 
light awaiting burial. But the atmosphere, albeit sub¬ 
dued, displayed an almost cheerful melancholy betokening 
a sorrow reconciled. Mourning, recovered from its first 
stupour, had reached the pleasant reminiscent stage in 
which the departed alderman, sustained with sandwiches 
and warmed with wine, was made one of the assembled 
company. Being yet unburied, decorum imposed com¬ 
plete suspension of the critical faculties. All his rigid 
acts and sayings were sanctified with the company’s con¬ 
tent, and dressed in tones of meditative sorrow. The 
Mayor’s attendant, in his rusty black, blended the hush 
of mourning with the assiduousness of service, suggest¬ 
ing refreshment so furtively to sorrowers that it looked, 
and sounded, rather as if he were soliciting a loan than 
proffering hospitality. The aldermen and councillors, 
freemen of the Sideboard, whose right to refreshment was 
inalienable, turned up tumblers and tilted decanters with 
the assurance of campanologists, helping themselves with 
a fine magnanimity to Port and Sherry, and pushing the 
salient angles of sandwiches into their municipal mouths, 
which they masticated along with memories of the dead. 


THE ALDERMAN 


123 


Whilst this official company discriminated in sand¬ 
wiches and accepted liquid sustenance at one another’s 
instigation, as if conforming to a pious rite, a growing 
crowd collected before the Mansion House. The advent 
of the local fire brigade in full regalia, armed with brass 
helmets and battle axes, and tramping two and two, sent 
a thrill through the expectant throng, which was agree¬ 
ably intensified by the tolling of the minute bells from St. 
Gyles’s and St. Saviour’s. A sense of urgency crept into 
the air that permeated even the seclusion of the Mayor’s 
parlour and made the company round the sideboard rest¬ 
less. Watches were produced and compared; glasses de¬ 
pleted. A low rumble, like faint and distant thunder, an¬ 
nounced that the retinue of corporation pair-horse mourn¬ 
ing coaches, chartered from the local livery stables to 
await the Mayor and civic dignitaries at St. Saviour’s, 
was on its way. The crowd, with that not always reliable 
instinct that comes of numbers, caught knowledge of the 
restlessness within, and constricted its cordon round the 
Mansion House. The cry escaped from extended throats: 

“They’re coming.” 

And in effect they came. Two by two—led by the 
mace-bearer in his funebrial robes and black cocked hat, 
with the gilded emblem of corporate pride upon his shoul¬ 
der, swathed in crape, the civic fathers slowly showed 
themselves to sight; pausing for one impressive moment 
on the topmost step as if to fix the solemn significance of 
what they stood for on the intent vision of the gaping 
crowd, before reducing their statures by descent and con¬ 
ceding place of prominence to those behind. First came 
the Mayor, with whom walked the ex-Mayor whose sup¬ 
port was deemed necessary to enable him to bear the bur¬ 
den of such public sorrow and so many eyes. Behind 
them, in descending scale of dignity came the aldermen 
and councillors, on whose heels in turn the salaried offi- 


124 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


cials trod, with a tail of delegates (some of whom bore 
wreaths) and those burgesses previously mentioned, pos¬ 
sessed of a prescriptive title to refreshment at the Mansion 
House on all occasions of public sorrow. These were aug¬ 
mented in the High Gate by a respectful contingent of 
petty tradesmen (municipal contractors in esse and posse) 
among whom the silk hat of solemn circumstances saw it¬ 
self gradually superseded by the less pretentious covering 
of felt; and by the lesser corporation functionaries, such 
as gas inspectors, clerks, carters, road-men, the market 
keeper on a wooden leg, sundry caretakers, and the Town 
Crier in a tail coat with electro-plated buttons, a red 
and white striped waistcoat and a top hat bound with 
silver braid. The procession, briefly halted on the pave¬ 
ment and marshalled into order by the manipulation of 
beckoning hands, put forth its feet at last. They were in 
motion. The long anticipated funeral had begun. His¬ 
tory, so recently suspended and inanimate, awoke once 
more to consciousness and did her part. There were 
children dragged by the hand or galloped on a jolting arm 
who would in later days recall participation in this strik¬ 
ing scene with pride. The solemn body, elongated in¬ 
credibly by the process of locomotion, crept sinuously 
over the pavement. The muffled mace, swaying with por¬ 
tentous rhythm above the sable hats and gleaming hel¬ 
mets as the procession took the hill, was already half way 
up Hill Street before the Town Crier in his tail coat and 
striped vest had settled on his length of stride, and the 
proper leg to go with it. From the flagstones, trodden 
by so many solemn feet, a slow and measured tramp re¬ 
sounded. To see all these public dignitaries reduced to 
one common measure of mourning, adopting the same 
pace, the same step, consciously or unconsciously borrow¬ 
ing the same bodily movements from one another; looking 
up and looking down, was a spectacle symbolic and pro- 


THE ALDERMAN 


125 


found. Here, animating one coherent whole, of a shape 
so undulatory and elastic as to be almost reptilian, was 
the very root and fruit and flower of Daneborough’s 
municipality. The sum total of importance comprised 
in this creeping monster that fed on paving-stones at the 
rate of two feet in every second, was incomputable. 
Every department of the borough, every feature of the 
town’s vitality had its representative here, in one or 
other of the oscillating segments of which the procession 
was composed. Gas, water, drains, macadam, markets 
and abattoirs—all marched imposingly incarnate to pay 
respect to Alderman Bankett’s clay. So embodied and 
substantialized the elusive spirit of bereavement w 7 as pre¬ 
sented in a shape emphatic, and rendered palpable to the 
meanest intelligence. Those among the thoughtless who 
had never reflected rightly on the nobleness of an aider- 
man, or understood the magnitude of his functions, had 
small excuse for any failure to realize these now 7 . 

Already a thick scum of the populace simmered round 
the railings of St. Saviour’s, whose western gateway— 
thrown widely open—was strewn with the rice that had 
been showered about the shoulders of an early morning 
bride. Within the sepulchral twilight of the Church a 
preternatural stillness reigned. Sunk in the pews, or 
kneeling on submerged hassocks, were many figures— 
feminine for the most part—who seemed by their attitudes 
of immobility to have been there for centuries. At inter¬ 
vals the form of Prestwich floated up and down the aisles 
behind his extended wand, engaged in the divided duty of 
allocating seats to stray worshippers, and maintaining 
contact with the Canon—already robed and waiting in 
the clerical vestry along w r ith the Canon Vicar of St. 
Gyles’s—and the outer world. Eight choristers (of 
whom Osw r ald formed one), spaced out over the choir 
stalls to suggest sixteen, sat motionless in their bleached 


126 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


surplices with their faces fixed upon the Western Doors; 
already unbolted and in readiness to be flung open at the 
first sign. Behind the depleted rows of choristers, dis¬ 
playing a maturer and more spacious interest, sat as 
many men. The Rate Collector, kindled already with an¬ 
ticipations of the seraphic fare to come, turned the look 
of a connoisseur upon the organ each time it creaked under 
the strain of its distended bellows. Already he had ex¬ 
horted Mr. Rencil to surpass himself and give the congre¬ 
gation something they could take away with them; some¬ 
thing they could look back upon and remember; something 
they couldn’t get at home or hear in any other church 
throughout the kingdom. “Something worthy of your¬ 
self, Sir. Something Sublime. Don’t be afraid to let the 
Corporation have it.” Seated out of sight upon his oaken 
bench, silently composing and recomposing his stops, the 
Organist’s thoughtful glasses seemed imbued already with 
something of the solemnity of the music he was about to 
play. Behind him the Deputy, following his every move¬ 
ment with the veneration of the neophyte, pushed a fre¬ 
quent head into the chancel and kept watch upon the 
Western Doors. In his place of dark and solitary con¬ 
finement the Blower, with forehead pressed against the 
wooden casement of the organ, followed the fluctuations 
of the plummet, and kept the organ’s lungs inflated. It 
breathed, this stertorous beast of bronchial pipes and 
wooden articulations; breathed hugely, like a great levia¬ 
than, ready to expel its breath through sonorous diapason 
and wailing reed at the first behest of its master’s fingers. 
They sank into the keys at last, on a hurried intimation 
from the Deputy. The air, so long imprisoned in the 
heaving confines of its leathern bellows, rolled out in sol¬ 
emn sound. The Alderman was coming. He was here, 
this stern-faced preacher of the practical; this contemner 
of the sentiments; this intolerator of all soft voices and 


THE ALDERMAN 


127 


sweet sounds. He was here, enveloped in the music he 
had hated; transfigured by it; received into the bosom of 
its vast and sheltering softness. 

“I am the Resurrection and the Life. ... No man 
cometh to the Father but by Me.” 

The phrases fell with dry cadence, trampled underfoot 
like dead leaves by the heavy feet of the perspiring bear¬ 
ers, and lost in the surge of other feet behind. At the 
steps of the main entrance, the great coffin shewed itself 
to the crowd from its elevation like an ark of gleaming 
gold. For a moment it shone forth with the uplifted 
splendour of benediction beneath the slanting beams of 
the late November sun. Then it passed into the inky 
shadow of the porch, that ate it foot by foot and swal¬ 
lowed the final remnant of its lustre. 

2 

Upon the little Oswald this funeral of Alderman Bank- 
ett produced a powerful impression. It was his first con¬ 
frontation with the real solemnity of life. His father’s 
death had fallen on him at an age when life’s realities 
are merely dreams. Miserableness filled him; he wept in¬ 
consolably; he kissed a marble countenance ice-cold and 
dreadfully reminiscent of someone previously known and 
loved. On a sudden life became incomprehensible like a 
page of print, elementary at first and simple to read, that 
later loses itself in long and unintelligible words. But 
with this last reality he had been formally connected. 
He had been a sentient part of it; his co-operation had 
been sought; he had contributed aid to Splendour. 

From the first dread tolling of the late Alderman’s 
knell, to that terrific moment when his coffin floated up the 
aisle as if borne upon the bosom of an inken flood and 
wafted slowly onward by waves invisible, he had occu- 


128 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


pied a world of solemn wonder and expectancy. It was 
a world, perhaps, too grave for one so young and so sus¬ 
ceptible, enjoying none of those rude reactions within the 
reach of his fellow choristers, who liquidated all their emo¬ 
tional liabilities on the spot, and ran up no long credits; 
cashing reverences into levity, and changing golden silence 
into the noisy coppers of sound at the first chance. Once 
his mother’s doubts upon the wisdom of his appearance 
at such a solemn gathering were overcome, she prepared 
her son for the event with as much diligence as if he had 
been a candidate for the Bishop’s hands. Whilst other 
choristers and youth in general shouted and ran, as if no 
Alderman lay dead, Oswald kept his soul aloof from every 
deed and sound that desecrated sorrow and threatened its 
state of grace. He took to church a mind so piously sub¬ 
dued and blanched, so resolutely divested of every bright 
happiness and tinted hope, that it constituted a corpse 
in itself. The deceased Alderman had not more com¬ 
pletely purged himself of earthly taint than Oswald, who 
lent almost bloodless lips to mourn him, filled with the be¬ 
lief that as much was demanded of his sadness as of his 
voice, and that grief, if it be sung at all, required the de- 
voutest sadness to sing it. 

“Think of your father, Oswald!” his mother had en¬ 
joined him in her last commendatory kiss, and he thought 
thereon till his lip trembled. The word Alderman, so un¬ 
familiar to his ears and lips before, and so remotely ap¬ 
prehended, drew now into the foreground of his mind, ac¬ 
quiring such awful stature and significance as it came that 
other words made way for it. 

For him, Alderman Bankett was an entity compounded 
of bells, churches, organs, dead marches, choirs, coffins, 
bark upon the roadway, chains, maces, brass helmets, 
policemen—everything, in a word, that had been so poig¬ 
nantly introduced to his emotion during these recent days, 


THE ALDERMAN 


129 


and had served to give his very life a fresh and solemn 
substance, dividing it and disintegrating it from the life 
so unsuspectingly and brightly lived before. 

And all this power, acting undiminished over such a 
gigantic field of operations, derived itself from a home¬ 
made hand cart and a market stall. Nay, if Elizabeth 
were to be believed (whose acquaintance we have yet to 
make—and in all things touching earlier Daneborough, her 
word seemed final) it derived itself from less than this. 
It derived itself from a basket that had tramped the coun¬ 
try roads and exchanged buttons and tape against eggs 
and chickens, which later it hawked about the purlieus of 
the market place; paying no stallage, but perambulating 
through the crowd and nudging the elbows of bargain 
hunters. 

A basket! All this power out of a basket. Riches, 
greatness, office, honour. A new feeling took hold of Os¬ 
wald in regard to baskets; a feeling akin to veneration. 
Hitherto he had viewed baskets as dubious associates, like 
choristers; things to be patiently endured for his dead 
father’s sake and discarded at the first opportunity; 
things whose inherent dreadfulness was only condoned by 
the punctilious method of their carriage. But now it was 
as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. He visioned 
baskets as exalted possibilities. What virtue once had 
done, virtue again might do. He would be virtuous and 
rich, like this defunct prototype; he would enter the Coun¬ 
cil. He would be an alderman; all his father’s enemies 
should be confounded ; a superb monument in marble should 
rise ere long above his father’s grave; his mother and 
his sister should be proud of him. 

No wonder that this funeral touched his emotions so 
deeply, for it was, in part, his own. Not Alderman 
Bankett but rather Alderman Holmroyd, the best of sons 
begotten of the best of fathers, filled this awesome coffin 


130 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


whose shape and slow approach shook tears from the be¬ 
holders. He was both what they buried and the glory sur¬ 
mounting burial. In the vivid alliance of his emotions 
with all that moved them he was every thing his eyes saw 
or susceptibility apprehended. Time past and time fu¬ 
ture clasped their tenses together like stricken hands and 
became overwhelmingly one in time present. These bells, 
slow beating, were for him. These tears; these whispers ; 
these solemn silences; these stirring feet; these helmets, 
hats, dead march and mace. When his own time came to 
die nothing must be changed in all that had happened or 
was happening now. From the first portentous tolling of 
St. Gyles’s bell upon the silence of a suspended choir prac¬ 
tice, to the last terrifying rite, no deviation from ap¬ 
proved pattern must take place. Not a single ingredient 
of present glory must be lacking. 

Led by desire to dedicate this solemn day to com¬ 
memorative sadness, Mrs. Holmroyd had at noon dismissed 
her school until the morrow, several of her scholars, in¬ 
deed, having discoursed enthusiastically on the subject of 
the “fune-ral,” and stating their intention to be present 
along with parents and friends. The service at St. 
Saviour’s was timed for two o’clock, and the hour had 
barely struck when Mrs. Holmroyd (filled with a laudable 
anxiety not to disappoint her son, who had begged them 
to await him outside the church) set forth upon her sacred 
errand accompanied by her little daughter. 

The great cortege had already been absorbed into St. 
Saviour’s when she and Beryl arrived. The string of 
empty mourning coaches solemnized the roadway round 
two of the churchyard walls; a great crowd clung to the 
railings, and scattered spectators traced desultory pat¬ 
terns about the tombs. Among these Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
feelings could not suffer to mingle, but on the southern 
side of the church, across the road (and nearly opposite to 


THE ALDERMAN 


131 


the iron wicket where Oswald took his pensive stand on 
practice nights) the pathway bounding the high wall and 
garden-doors of the houses in St. Lawrence Square rose 
and dropped over a little hill. This hill, scarped perpen¬ 
dicularly to the road on the Church side, and faced with 
a stone wall whose parapet followed its abrupt contour, 
though it afforded no great temptation to hardened sight¬ 
seers who love treading on each other’s toes, and breath¬ 
ing down each other’s necks, and for whom a contested 
proximity furnishes half their joy, provided an ideal place 
for a remote sorrow shunning earthly contact. Here on 
this summit Mrs. Holmroyd and her daughter kept their 
vigil; not stationary, (an attitude suggestive of mere 
sightseeing) but expressing justified attendance by a slow 
pacing to and fro. The deep reverberations of the organ 
reached them; they were stirred by the sound of sublimated 
singings; the impressive emblem of mortality emerged at 
last, weaving its slow way down the gravel paths in the 
soft sunlight behind the intersecting branches of the 
stripped November trees. Mrs. Holmroyd clasped her lit¬ 
tle daughter with an instinctive gesture of sorrow and pro¬ 
tection. The great procession drained itself away; the 
churchyard lay at length behind the moving cortege , 
empty and desolate. 

Beryl said, “Let us go . . . into it,” and Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s own desires subscribed, and they descended the lit¬ 
tle hill and passed through the wicket and mingled with 
the placid, undemonstrative tombs. In the sunlight these 
seemed to meditate, like blind men that see nothing but 
their own introspections, on which they smile. But their 
rapt contentment brought trouble to Mrs. Holmroyd too, 
as well as peace. She thought of that other grave in dis¬ 
tant Clothton, its very shape by this time subsiding into 
the clay as if discouraged with its long and fruitless effort 
of expectancy, in the way that sick hope—too frequently 


132 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


bestirred in vain—sinks back on a despondent pillow. 
Every time she dwelt among these memorials of the dead 
her heart upbraided her. All the dead were mourned but 
hers. Cross and ledger, kerb and headstone, marble and 
granite, offered themselves for her selection. Always she 
was making choice; always resolving. And still despair¬ 
ing love remained inactive. 0! some memorial he must 
surely have. . . . 

Mr. Rencil, walking with a stranger and followed by 
the Deputy who bore beneath one arm a load of bound 
organ music of the size and substance of a paving stone, 
passed down the gravel drive to the main gate. He turned 
on Mrs. Holmroyd his customary softened gaze through 
the blandness of his broad glasses; raised his hat and 
(divining her errand) greeted her by name. 

“Oswald is coming, Mrs. Holmroyd,” he told her in the 
soft voice that was the counterpart of his look. “He is 
only just helping to put some books away for me. It will 
not take him a minute.” Here was no remark to cause 
tears, and yet . . . something in the organist’s recogni¬ 
tion and the gentle look and kindly voice made Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s eyelids burn. They recalled other eyes, another 
voice; sweeter and happier days. And also, perhaps, a 
little foolish pride was gratified in her. For Mr. Rencil, 
albeit they had no formal acquaintance, and had ex¬ 
changed no real words, invited always her acknowledg¬ 
ment when they met, saluting her with a courtesy that as¬ 
sured her she was still a lady. Again, strengthened with 
emotive power, her thought for Oswald’s future was re¬ 
vived. Without delay his musical education must begin 
in earnest. Every time she encountered the gentle medi¬ 
tative gaze of the Organist of St. Saviour’s the resolution 
struggled to be realized. The eyes of the organist, soft 
though they were, seemed on occasions veiled with the en¬ 
quiring mildness of reproach; as if this hope of hers. 


THE ALDERMAN 


133 


escaping with her looks, were known to both, and he asked 
her how long she meant her son should lack this teaching 
so essential to his welfare. Not long, not long . . . (she 
told herself). For this dread burden, borne with so much 
circumstance through the town to-day, had caused the 
very air to droop as though it bore some solemn part of 
it. Death is a great instructor, that recalls careless life 
to its forgotten duties. She would take profit from the 
lesson taught, with God’s good help. 

Meanwhile, awaiting Oswald, they had wandered to the 
south porch. Whilst they looked the dull door opened, 
and who should emerge—pitting his small body against its 
heavy hinges—but Oswald’s self, his face still pale from 
its recent part in such solemnities. Above his slight and 
fragile figure the deep profundity of the church, filled with 
a dusky, oceanic green like deep sea-water, loomed for a 
moment beyond the opened door, showing how vain and 
weak a thing is man. They exchanged greetings of re¬ 
strained joy, and Beryl’s eyes, fixed still upon the space 
occupied so recently by the solemn vision of the nave, be¬ 
sought her mother that they should enter. She did but 
lend a voice to the yearnings in her mother’s heart, and 
subduing their looks and movements to the place they en¬ 
tered, they passed into the twilight of the church, whose 
grave features still retained like Oswald’s face traces of 
the recent ordeal undergone. No other living figures ten¬ 
anted the dim box pews, but from afar—as if remotely 
reaching them from the invisible next world—a sustained 
cantilation rose and fell, draped in its own echoes like 
robed and floating angels, that was the voice of Prestwich 
in the clergy vestry, descanting to the blower and the 
man-of-all-work on the subject of vocabularies viewed in 
their regard to funeral orations. He deplored that Canon 
Quexley was so ill-equipped in this department of his 
office, and (expressing keen disappointment with his ora- 


134 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


tory on Sunday) wished the congregation might have 
benefited by the discourse of such a divine as Archdeacon 
Benefit, whose vocabulary (it transpired) accorded death 
the support that such a theme demanded, and that critical 
listeners had a right to expect. From a picture of Arch¬ 
deacon Benefit, “who was a Christian and a Gentleman as 
you don’t often meet in collusion with such scholarship,” 
he turned contemptuously on Canon Quexley with the 
scathing question: “What is he?”—the answer falling 
true to formula: “A man of no vocabulary. You can 
cover all the words he uses with your hand. And when 
I say Words, mark you, I mean Words. Words suited 
to a man’s intellect and status; words that can be looked 
up to and respected even by those that doesn’t under¬ 
stand them. Canon relies too much on rank and personal 
appearance. Not but what I’m willing to concede he 
looks transpontine in the pulpit, and he can give out 
hymns and parish notices in a manner calculated to im¬ 
press parties that haven’t heard him preach, and doesn’t 
know what preaching should be if they have. If I had to 
sum up Canon Quexley in a word I should . . . What’s 
that? Is it somebody in church?” 

3 

It was only the heavy latch of the south door that, es¬ 
caping Oswald’s fingers, too conscientious in their efforts 
to preserve solemnity, fell resoundingly on the hasp as 
Mrs. Holmroyd and her children left the church. In one 
of the endmost pews—not the pew in which she held her 
sittings and took her place on Sunday—Mrs. Holmroyd 
had immersed herself for prayer, whilst Oswald and his 
sister, abashed and silent, turned sidelong eyes upon the 
bowed head, curious to know what form of invocation is¬ 
sued from the hidden lips. Her prayer was brief, but 


THE ALDERMAN 135 

earnest; for she made the most of moments threatened 
with intrusion. As hurriedly as she had knelt she rose 
at last and showed a face refreshed and tranquil to her 
children; a face that sought to share with them the spirit¬ 
ual sustenance just received. The verger, gownless and 
de-glorified, interrupting for a space his peroration on the 
subject of vocabularies, quitted the vestry and showed a 
scrutinizing nostril in the chancel, that pierced the dim¬ 
ness of the nave as if it had been a dilated eye. But the 
authors of the disturbance were already gone—as was 
also when he returned: (after a rapid interchange of cour¬ 
tesies between fluttering thumb and forefinger and recep¬ 
tive nose) his late audience, which had decamped by way 
of the vestry door; a fact bearing witness to the melan¬ 
choly truth so constantly deplored by Prestwich that 
vocabularies were no longer respected of the vulgar. 

This day, with all its strange and powerful emotions, 
Oswald never forgot. It seemed as if the whole wide 
world he walked in had been transformed and sabbatized. 
Even the ordinary facts and things of life wore unfamiliar 
Sunday clothes. A new air, that might have been im¬ 
ported straight from Heaven for all it breathed of earth, 
replaced the old. Yesterday it had smelled of warm hu¬ 
midity and dead leaves; to-day it exhaled the beatific 
odour of faint spices; clinging with the soft insistency of 
a shroud, that draped the whole world with sanctity, veil¬ 
ing its earthliness from view and simplifying its contours. 
Sorrow, sweetened and purified, seemed consecrate to high 
ends. The barriers of mortality were broken; life and 
death seemed curiously and inseparably one. This was 
no longer Daneborough they walked in, but some heavenly 
city of the hereafter where anger had no place, and from 
all evil thoughts they lived remote. 

They passed into the broad Town Acres. A soft St. 
Martin’s breeze upraised itself from time to time, like 


136 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


hands in benediction, commending loves and blessing 
hopes. The burnless late November sun gathered al¬ 
ready the folds of the hazy mantle that shortly he would 
wrap about his declining head, and, gilding the stubble, 
tinged with pale gold the narrow path they trod. Three 
plough teams, biblical in their solemnity, moved slowly 
over the surface of the brown soil, followed by a cortege 
of restless crows, like this afternoon’s mourners, and 
flights of distracted pewits that seemed to wring their 
very wings with woe as they uttered their despairing 
plaint. In the distant furrows a blue mist lay already: 
in attentuated wisps it floated immobile and nebulous 
above the hollows of the soil, like disembodied thoughts. 
Drawn each to each by the reflected loss of somebody their 
lives had never known, their looks and voices vied in soft¬ 
ness and compassion. Not once did Oswald contradict 
his sister; not once did Beryl snatch the wilful final word. 
Each feared to break that incredible perfection of be¬ 
haviour which, thanks to the propitious death of Aider- 
man Bankett seemed now unquestionably theirs. In this 
new and glorious perfection they lavished on their mother 
a quiet but insistent love that made her feel how blessed 
above all women she was in them. When, their saintly 
wanderings over, they came back to their home in Spring 
Bank Gardens, Oswald and Beryl strove to retain hold 
on the comfortable but evasive perfection by every 
service proffered and relinquished. From its allotted 
drawer in the kitchen dresser Oswald drew forth the white 
cloth with the devotion of an acolyte and spread it rev¬ 
erently on the table in the front room as if he draped an 
altar. The cups and saucers, piously deposited, seemed 
metamorphosed into sacred vessels, that tinkled when the 
spoons touched them, like sanctus bells. He stole on 
tip-toe with his chancel tread, apprehensive lest by any 
lapse into the secular employment of his feet he might 


THE ALDERMAN 


137 


break the protecting spell of sanctity encircling him. 
No one could have divined with what uplifting goodness 
he was filled. It surprised himself; abashed him, even. 
Never more, from this memorable day, should he give 
way to sin. Upon this broad and level path of good¬ 
ness would he henceforth walk, as Alderman Bankett and 
his father had walked before him. The whole secret of 
virtuous living was revealed. How easy and how blessed 
was it to be good. Filled with this spirit he folded his 
hands and closed his eyes, and had got as far as “For 
what we are going . . .” when Beryl, consumed with 
equal fervour to be good, pulled his hands apart and 
intercepted the supplication with her eager voice: “No, 
no. Let me, Oswald!—‘For what we are going to ’ceive 
may the Law make us truly thankful. . . .” The 
grace got no further on her lips than that. The hands 
darkening her eyes and hiding from expectant piety the 
sweet things on the table, came asunder on a sudden to 
allow a glance of fearful apprehension to emerge. 

“My purse!” she cried, looking wildly from Oswald to 
her mother, “Who has it?” 


Who had it? 

Nobody had it, in effect. Nobody but herself to-day 
had seen it. This precious receptacle of all her recent 
savings, including a farthing dressed in tissue-paper and 
some coloured beads, must now be resting on the pew- 
edge at St. Saviour’s, where she remembered to have con¬ 
fided it to the admiration of the Almighty during her 
mother’s prayer. The loss, reproaching an overtrustful 
piety, plunged her into tears. Her mother’s tender 
“Never mind, darling!” pricked contrition deeper than 
the sharpest of words. She thrust bereaved knuckles 


138 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


into either eye and made patent preparations to be 
inconsolable. 

Oswald, a grave spectator of this disturbing grief, felt 
his security on a sudden threatened. 

“. . . Oswald will run and fetch it for you, Beryl,” 
he heard the voice of Fate, making usage of his mother’s 
lips, declare. He shot a hasty look at his mother’s 
imperturbable sweet face, that not all the funerals of 
the world could awe, and with a pendant head rose 
blindly from his seat. 

“ ... Not now, dear. After tea.” 

After tea! Was his mother mad? Had the sorrow of 
this afternoon so weighed upon her that she was grown 
oblivious of approaching nighttime and the dark? Al¬ 
ready the little tea-table drew more light from its own 
white cloth than from the window, whose upper panes 
seemed to have turned ashen with the reciprocation of his 
own fears. Even at this moment the dying day offered 
but a dubious light for purse-hunters in a dim church 
that had contained a coffin, twelve firemen, a mace with its 
jaw tied up, and heaven knows how many sepulchral forms 
in crape. Now! Now! He must go now this very min¬ 
ute. A hundred reasons urged it. It was a race with the 
expiring lights of day. Fear, disguised as goodness, pro¬ 
fessed for its weeping sister’s sake there was no moment 
to be lost. If only his cowardice had had the courage of 
its convictions, to proclaim itself always what it was, how 
easy life might be; divested of every pretention that made 
it terrible. He said with a carelessness almost jaunty, “I 
will not be long, mother.” His mother answered, “we 
will wait for you, Oswald.” Beryl, suffused with sudden 
gratitude at the thought of her recovered purse, flung im¬ 
pulsive arms around his neck. She ran to fetch his cap, 
his gloves. Love dressed him like a warrior for the fray; 
love opened the door for him; love—cruel that love ever 


THE ALDERMAN 


139 


is—made his going easy; sped him on his deadly errand. 
He set off at a step quicker than consideration for such a 
solemn day approved, with an anxious reference to the 
light allotted from above. 

Out of the pores of the autumnal earth a twilight haze 
began to creep; the sky in the West was streaked with 
the last pink parallels of the setting sun; the lamp-lighter 
hurried on his zig-zag course, bearing his ghostly glimmer 
at the end of his long pole, and touching one by one the 
municipal gas-jets into life. The day-light was ebbing 
fast. It was the solemn hour when things put off their 
daytime dress and draw the dusk about them; peeping 
abroad with sinister nocturnal eyes, in which all gleam of 
friendliness is quenched; when thoughts creep out of their 
subliminal hiding places, like the mist, and fold the sober¬ 
est fancy in a grey and ghostly garb. The ghost of 
Alderman Bankett, ridiculing coffins and the masonry of 
cemented vaults, arose—no longer vested with inestimable 
virtues, but making preliminary trial of the shape that all 
dead people, be they good or bad, seem to turn to indif¬ 
ferently in the dark. Even the cries of the Friday night 
choristers came back to earth, with a vitality increased : 
hooting owl-like in Oswald’s ear, and producing dreadful 
death-rattles by means of forefingers agitated violently in 
open mouths: “Ooooooo! Hey-up! Yon’s alderman, 
sither. Alderman Bankett’s after ye.” 

By this time his urgent footsteps brought him to the 
gate through which so many gruesome forms had come and 
gone this afternoon. The sky was closing down upon him ; 
the church itself, enfolded gloomily in its own buttresses, 
showed as remote and unencouraging as Prestwich. 
What a church! Why were churches built so big? 
Why did they set them so far from human companionship 
and aid? He touched the gate with a trepid hand, and a 
surge of thankfulness arose in him. Providence had 


140 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


harkened to his prayer. Jubilate deo, the gate was 
locked. 

In the revulsion of delivery, fear grew reckless. What 
better justification indeed, did the most self-respecting 
fear require than this? Ex uno disce omnes should have 
been its maxim. But filled with faith in Providence and 
meretricious longing to prove its mettle in a campaign 
where glory could be had so cheap, fear must needs run 
round to the side wicket, sunk in the southern wall, be¬ 
neath the darkling shadow of the tree, and touch that too. 
Whereat the wicket moved on its hinges and made way 
for him like a trustful child. 

To say that he was startled would be, in the verger’s 
parlance, a degradation of vocabulary. As well might 
the Corporation have gone in state to Alderman Bankett’s 
funeral preceded by a brass meat-jack tied up in a pud¬ 
ding cloth as attempt to publish Oswald’s feelings by so 
inadequate a word. Before the dread discovery he stood 
transfixed and appalled. What signified this open gate, 
on whose integrity his confidence had so relied? No sign 
of Prestwich and his flickering taper lent assurance to 
any window. What further act did conscience now de¬ 
mand of him? In silence he stood and wrestled with this 
awful problem. 

The sky above soaked up darkness as if it were ink in 
blotting paper. Not a soul passed by. The church 
emitted no human sound. 

He looked intently through the narrow avenue of tombs 
through which the pathway struck, knowing all his future 
hung upon what happened now. And suddenly, gather¬ 
ing the very panic of his fears about him for protection, 
he burst through the gate and sped through the aston¬ 
ished tombs. With an eye that knew nor right nor left 
he flung himself against the latch of the south door, that 
yielded as the treacherous wicket had done. In turn the 


THE ALDERMAN 


141 


red baize door ceded to his fury. Fear, like a drift of 
storm-blown sky-wrack, blew into the darkness of the 
church. Expostulatory groans burst out on all sides of 
him. Disturbed corpses, as if the church had been some 
wrecked hull sunk fathoms deep below the surface of the 
sea, rose up out of every pew and floated in a ghastly 
company to the roof. Fear could afford to shew no piety 
in such a place. It pounced into the darkening pew that 
prayer and love had occupied this afternoon. Something 
softer than a prayerbook was dislodged, that fell as with 
a startled gasp upon the floor. It was the purse. But 
terror had no time for exultation. His groping fingers 
closed on it; an unseen, bony hand, hard as the pew ledge 
itself, rapped a painful blow upon his head in rising. 
The baize door tried to bar his passage; he struck it with 
both fists. He spurned the southern door, leaving it to 
shut itself as best it could. The tombstones, gathered 
ready for his egress like assassins, closed their ranks upon 
him as he ran, with determination to hem him in. But 
he outstripped the last of them by a hair’s breadth, and 
dashed into safety through the wicket (that he had the 
presence of mind to close against them) panting like a 
spent hare. 

He had done what never in his sober mind he thought it 
possible himself could do. It was a deed incredible, 
heroic. Through the breathless subsidence of his terrors 
rose a mighty exultation. The best of fathers would be 
proud of him, above. 

As he turned from the gates his foot struck an object 
on the ground that intuition told him was no pebble. Al¬ 
though he lacked sight of it, some subtle sense—doubtless 
heightened by the recent enterprise in which all his senses 
had been developed to such a transcendent pitch of sus¬ 
ceptibility—divined that something rolled away upon its 
edge, and subsided with the minute ring of metal. What 


142 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


if it should chance to be a coin! A penny; a sixpenny 
piece; a shilling. He stooped, tracing with sharpened 
eye the path his intuition said the moving object had 
taken, and his fingers—making eager furrows in the 
gravel, discovered it at length. Circular it was, as in¬ 
tuition had suspected; of about the circumference of a 
florin. Metallic was it too, for it reflected the last beams 
of daylight like an oblique bull’s eye. He picked it up 
for scrutiny, stirred by strange feelings of elation and 
hope. This was no common coin. He saw now precisely 
what it was. It was the substantial headpiece of a 
solitaire—just such a solitaire, in fact, as clipped his 
own small cuff; but more than twice the size, and richly 
chased. An article, perhaps, of priceless value. He 
could not estimate its worth. Pounds, possibly. All the 
same he wished it had been a shilling. There was some¬ 
thing definite about a shilling; something final and con¬ 
clusive, on which one’s judgment could repose. Besides, 
such treasure-trove as this pertained to somebody, where¬ 
as coins seemed universal. He looked about him carefully 
on every hand to make sure his conduct had attracted the 
attention of no spectator. There was none in sight. 
For all he had been brought up to the pious maxim that 
finding is not keeping, he experienced the proud thrill of 
satisfaction that accompanies a discovery unshared, and 
thrust the solitaire into the deepest corner of the purse. 
Now, indeed, his wondrous work was done, and with this 
two-fold triumph could he hasten home. 


BOOK V 


THE COUNCILLOR 

1 

T HE morrow’s daylight brought emancipation 
from many fears. Alderman Bankett in his bed 
of masonry, seemed—for the nonce—remote as 
the moon. His memory might be evoked without a qualm. 
Yet logically, if there be any intrinsic awfulness in the 
condition of death, the late lamented alderman—being 
one whole day deader than before—should have been four 
and twenty hours more terrible to all juvenile respecters 
of his latest state. But the fears of youth are as il¬ 
logical as the loves of mothers and the arguments of men. 

Meanwhile the solitaire—that had passed the night 
warmly in Beryl’s purse, beneath her pillow—resumed its 
interest and importance. It was disclosed to the next 
door neighbour as a personage of no small erudition in 
local affairs, who tested its quality with her tongue, and 
described the hall-mark “eighteen carat, marm. You 
may be sure it’s not been bought for nothink. The pair 
would cost somebody close on five pound.” With Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s assent she took the trophy round to sundry 
neighbours likely, in her opinion, to cast light upon it— 
or at least to share (and even amplify) her curiosity. 
But none was able to affix ownership. 

“What I should do, marm,” she confided to Mrs. Holm- 
royd in a voice lowered to suggest discretion, which was 
her nearest attainment to the exercise of this excellent 
quality. “I shouldn’t say nothink to nobody of a while. 
As like as not there’ll be a reward offered if you keep quiet 
a bit.” 


143 


144 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


From such a course of action Mrs. Holmroyd’s spirit 
recoiled. “Reward!” she said, shocked the more because 
her children both stood by, and so corruptive a sentiment 
must be repelled at once. “I would not think of taking it, 
Mrs. Kenway. The stud does not belong to us. We 
could not possibly accept money for a thing which is not 
ours.” 

Her neighbour, scornful of such weak-spirited morality, 
expressed a very different view upon the question. 

“When a thing’s once lost,” she said, “it’s nobody’s, 
marm. Them that finds has as good a right to it as them 
that loses. If they was to say nothink, nobody would 
never be the wiser.” The solitaire, reclaimed by Mrs. 
Holmroyd with a “Thank you” of quiet dignity that was 
a rebuke,—all told,—circulated through the inquisitive 
fingers of her scholars in turn, who subjected it to every 
test of curiosity, and were not indisposed to constitute it 
their exclusive study for the morning; but these combined 
efforts brought no enlightenment. The father of one of 
them (it transpired) had a pair of studs like these— 
though not the same—and larger. The uncle of another 
had a diamond pin. Somebody’s sister owned a pearl 
necklet and had been to London by the Railway Trip three 
years ago. The conversation, obviously developing into 
a concerted movement against Time—whom it sought to 
outflank by every manoeuvre known to scholarship—was 
brought back firmly to its pot-hooks and slate pencils. 
Discipline had been restored, and the academic stillness of 
the room was broken only by the sniffs and scratches and 
laboured breathings of preoccupation when suddenly all 
heads were startled by a dreadful announcement. 

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd! Willie Johnson’s spitting 
on his slate and rubbing it with his hand!” 

The infant thus detected in this most repulsive of 
academic crimes, secreted his slate instantly beneath a 


THE COUNCILLOR 


145 


defensive fore-arm, and, showing a face of incredible 
malevolence over his shoulder, cried: 

“I aren’t then! You’re a storjer. I haven’t spit once 
this morning. I haven’t spit since yesterday. It’s you 
that’s spitting.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd, shaping a countenance of appropriate 
horror and distress at these revolting revelations, said 
“Hush! Oh hush!” But before she had time to ad¬ 
dress her scholars on the reprehensibility of the act al¬ 
leged, or expound to the full its pernicious influence on 
health and morals when developed into a habit, a voice 
accompanying an outstretched finger cried dramatically: 

“Look, Mrs. Holmroyd! It’s the Bellman. He’s 
stopping. He’s going to shout something.” 

Even the culprit, moved by the announcement, strug¬ 
gled from his seat to catch a glimpse of this far-famed 
official. The scholars rose as one to gather round the 
window. Over the colliding heads of her academy Mrs. 
Holmroyd peeped into the street below, where the portly 
functionary who had paced at the rear of Alderman 
Bankett’s funeral yesterday was now to be seen, looking 
first to this side and then to that, and taking stock of all 
the windows, as a primo tenore rolls impressive eyes 
around the tiers of breathless boxes before melting into 
an aria. He wore his municipal silk hat bound with its 
silver braid, and his municipal blue tail coat garnished 
with the bright electro-plated buttons, and the municipal 
red and white striped waistcoat. But in addition he wore 
on his right hand to-day a brazen gauntlet that turned 
out to be the bell of office held by its clapper. This, first 
transferring to his left hand and thence back again by 
way of the handle to his right, he swung with solemn em¬ 
phasis for the space of nearly a minute; at the end of 
which time, stifling the bell’s vibrations in the folded hol¬ 
low of his left hand he threw up his head like a bull at 


146 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


feeding time and cried forth his proclamation in the 
stentorian foggy voice for which he was renowned, and by 
whose virtue and his impressive corporate ventrosity he 
had prevailed over half a score of rivals in open compe¬ 
tition before a Sub-Committee of the Town Fathers in the 
Horse Green, where his masterly manipulation of the bell, 
his side-whiskers and excellent demeanour (even at the 
extreme range of two hundred yards) evoked favourable 
comment from critics previously (and subsequently) 
fortified for their exacting duties by recourse to the 
mayoral parlour. 

He vocalized monotonously over two tones—these be¬ 
ing, as Mr. Rencil might have pointed out, the unac¬ 
centuated subdominant and accented tonic—in much the 
same way that Oswald pointed the psalms. His vocal or¬ 
gan was so resonant, and as he declaimed the words he so 
turned his head and mouth towards the four quarters of 
the compass in rotation that by far the larger part of 
what he uttered was lost to his hearers in the schoolroom; 
wdio, truth to tell, were more active in imposing silence 
than observing it. But it was agreed he had begun his 
proclamation with the word “Lost,” and “Tuesday” had 
been mentioned, and an address in Daneborough given, 
and some of the scholars vowed there was mention of a 
Reward. None betrayed the least doubt as to the nature 
of the publication. It concerned Oswald’s solitaire. 
The owner, alive to its loss, was having it cried to the 
town. There was only one course to be followed. 

“Run, Oswald dear,” said his mother, “and ask the 
Crier who it is, and where the stud is to be taken.” Add¬ 
ing in a commendatory undertone as he moved to do her 
bidding: “Don’t forget to say Please and Thank you, 
Oswald.” 

Filled with importance to be the unquestionable discov- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


147 


erer of so notable a solitaire, Oswald ran downstairs bare¬ 
headed and into the roadway to the spot where the Bell¬ 
man had been. But he was there no longer. Actuated by 
conspicuous powers of locomotion he had travelled al¬ 
ready some distance up the street, and after a moment’s 
hesitation at the sight of his objective so far remote— 
giving an uneasy glance at the schoolroom window, that 
seemed alive with rapping knuckles and agitated heads 
and hands—Oswald started in pursuit. 

Now there is more difficulty in negotiating a Bellman— 
once he is in motion—than the thoughtless deem. As 
Oswald pursued the retreating shoulders he was dismayed 
to note how big and broad they grew, and how much more 
bulk the functionary offered for respectful eyes to dwell 
on, viewed from the roadway in the rear, than from the 
vantage of the schoolroom window. Also, the blue of his 
official coat assumed a cut and tincture too constabulary; 
and Oswald grew uncomfortably conscious of the absence 
of his own hat. With a beseechful gaze, therefore, upon 
the Bellman’s tail buttons, that stared back on their pur¬ 
suer with the stony disregard of eyes, Oswald kept up his 
pursuit at a dog-trot pace between walking and running, 
nicely regulated by the Bellman’s own. 

“He is sure to stop at the next corner,” Oswald as¬ 
sured himself. “I must not lose sight of him.” 

But the Bellman ignored the next corner as completely 
as if it had been no corner at all, and passed on with a 
step betraying not the least abatement. Nor was Os¬ 
wald’s peace of mind improved by the fact that other 
children, without the least official claim on the Bellman’s 
attention, but stimulated by his own pursuit, joined in the 
chase, thus compromising his mission with the vulgarest 
curiosity. Depressed by this new company at his heels, 
it was not until Oswald had begun to lose both ground 


148 THE TREBLE CLEF 

and hope that the Crier stopped at last and smote the 
air with his bell. 

This time Oswald could better mark the notable effect 
produced by it. Doors opened; curtains were pulled 
aside; heads in dustcaps issued from upper windows; 
bare arms wrapped up in aprons multiplied at passage 
ends. From everywhere and in no time an audience as¬ 
sembled to collect the words expelled by the Bellman’s 
powerful lungs. And strangely stirred, Oswald heard the 
message, spaced by stertorous breathing, that the object 
of his long pursuit declaimed. It was as follows:— 

LOST! 

On TUESDAY afterNOON 
Betwixt the MANSION HOUSE 
St. SAVIOUR’S CHURCH 
And CIMITERY 
Or THEREABOUTS. 

Between the HOWERS of ONE 
And TWO THIRTY, p. m. 

Part of a GOLD 
SLEEVE STUD 
Oo-HEVER shall FIND SAME 
And will RETURN it 
To number THIRTY 
HUNMOUTH ROAD 
Will be SUITABLY 
Re-WARD-ed. 

This proclamation ended, the Bellman reclaimed his bell 
once more from its resting place in the cradle of his folded 
left arm and passed quickly on to arouse the interest and 
stir the echoes of other corners. The congregated 
women, reducing their circle now that the Bellman was no 
longer constituted the attractive centre of it, prepared to 
discuss the news at length. 


THE COUNCILLOR 


149 


“A gold stud,” said one. 

“It’ll tek some finding, missus,” said another. 

“A deal more finding than what it would if it’d been 
brass,” said a third. 

“They don’t name Reward,” said a fourth. 

“They know better,” said the fifth. 

Speculation was indulged in as to the identity of the 
advertiser and the chances of the stud’s recovery, and the 
listening children were stimulated to activity with re¬ 
proaches on their indolence. 

“Don’t stand staring there. Be off wi’ you. Use your 
eyes and look for stud. You’ll let somebody else get it 
if you’re not sharp.” 

Oswald, magnetized by the conversation, stood for some 
minutes a silent auditor. At first a wondrous pride pos¬ 
sessed him. He it was who had the stud, whose vigilance 
discovered it. His eye, sharpened to a point of supplica¬ 
tion, almost besought these loquacious ladies to connect 
his presence with the thing discussed and to interrogate 
him. But for all he was by far the cleanest member of 
the company, they gave him no attention; his presence 
passed without comment. Not until the children were 
commanded to “be off and look for stud” did his pride 
undergo a sudden transformation and turn to guilt and 
shame. He had forestalled these children. The stud was 
his already that they were about to look for. Their 
diligence must be in vain. 0! how angry they would be 
with him if they did but know. All longing to be ques¬ 
tioned left him. He stole away. 

2 

The bricks of the houses on the Hunmouth Road were 
redder than the bricks of houses in other quarters of the 
town; for to this eastern side of Daneborough, more than 


150 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


any other, the energies of the builder and the ambitions of 
the prosperous were directed. As each aspiring trades¬ 
man advanced in turn to a degree of prosperity that could 
contemplate detachment from the business source of it, he 
turned his eye towards the Hunmouth Road as inevitably 
as in decrepit age men give a thought to Heaven, to 
which (indeed) this pious retirement on the Hunmouth 
Road might be regarded as the first stage. Even the 
lamented Alderman Bankett, albeit never to his latest 
breath employing fourpence for any purpose that three¬ 
pence ha’penny was competent to serve, submitted to this 
custom, prompted by the laudable desire that his last days 
might be spent in some spot nearer and more befitting his 
Maker than the potato shop in Lower Tomb Street. 

The house whose number had been proclaimed so lustily 
by the Town Crier during the course of the morning was 
within but a few years of being as ruddy as the ruddiest. 
It was a detached double-fronted villa overlooking the ex¬ 
tensive Town Acres, from which only the Hunmouth Road 
divided it. Above one of its gables the slated roof gave 
birth to an aborted turret, protected by a cast iron 
balustrade, on which the individual fond of elevation and 
unsubject to vertigo might take the air on all fours, or 
with the aid of binoculars and favoured by the weather, 
obtain a view of the horses streaming across the Race 
Course on Sellinger Day. Not that anybody ever did; 
this superb prospect remaining the prerogative of brick¬ 
layers and an occasional plumber. On the bevelled cop¬ 
ing of the lower front wall immediately flanking the iron 
gate, from which a painted palisading sprang, was 
carved in deep and monumental letters the number that 
the Bellman had announced, whilst on the coping at the 
opposite side of the gate, in the same deep and chiselled 
lettering, were the words BRIAR DENE, offered evi¬ 
dently as a picturesque alternative to visitors with no 


THE COUNCILLOR 


151 


head for numbers. From the gateway an asphalt path, 
cutting a curt lawn in two, led to the front porch. 
Ferns in place of flowers spread their fronds at the foot 
of the window bays, and wreathed a rockery outrivalling 
the turret in pretentiousness—and even superseding the 
house itself in topographical importance, being used by 
every postman, constable and errand boy as a bearing in 
their negotiation of the district. For this rockery, dis¬ 
sociating itself from glittering felspar and oyster shells 
with which rockeries of the period usually ravished the eye 
of the beholder, aspired to architectural heights by its in¬ 
corporation of crocketed stone finials and gargoyles and 
molten glass and twisted lead and bell-metal from the an¬ 
cient church of St. Gyles, that had been destroyed by the 
fiery hand of God within the living memory of man. 
Elizabeth’s own eyes, in fact, had seen the belfry fall, and 
her two hands were able to depict its collapse with a 
graphic intensity that thrilled Oswald’s imagination and 
lent an added terror to the dark. It is true that scarce 
a garden of self-respect or consequence in Daneborough 
but was regaled with relics from the same source; never¬ 
theless, few offered them to the public eye in such impres¬ 
sive form, and “Rockery House” was not less frequently 
an appellation of the home of the solitaire than the name 
and number incised upon its garden wall. 

To this house, as shortly after midday as her scholastic 
labours allowed, Mrs. Holmroyd made her way accom¬ 
panied by both her children. Beryl carried her hands in 
a little woolwork muff sedately borne before her—not that 
the morning air was cold, or that her fingers felt the need 
of such defence against the weather, but as an adjunct to 
importance. Oswald, wearing his Sunday gloves and cap, 
guarded in his pocket the momentous solitaire, wrapped 
in cotton wool and fine paper. They had no knowledge 
of the famous Rockery to guide them, and relied solely 


152 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


on the number retained by Oswald from the Crier’s 
proclamation; but the numbers along the Hunmouth 
Road, intercepted by gardens and by other roads leading 
out of it, multiplied so slowly that Mrs. Holmroyd began 
to entertain a doubt of the accuracy of her son’s memory 
or hearing—a doubt which, truth to tell, whilst denying, 
he more than shared with her. When at last they reached 
the mystic Thirty it struck their eyes with such a strange¬ 
ness, and the gate and rockery and garden seemed to bear 
so little relationship to solitaires that all of them gazed in 
silence for a moment at this unconvincing goal of their 
journey. 

. . Are you quite sure, Oswald?” Mrs. Holmroyd 
asked. He was. That is to say he tried his very best to 
be. For other numbers had now begun to press their 
claims unpleasantly upon him. Without further question 
his mother pushed open the elaborately foliated gate, and 
solemnly they walked in order up the asphalt path to the 
front door, whose upper panels were resplendent with cut 
and coloured glass. 

Succeeding a delay not without significance to one well 
versed in the liturgy of housekeeping, the door was dubi¬ 
ously opened by a maid of diminutive stature, occupied 
in pulling over a plump red wrist the second of her sleeves. 
Being, doubtless, more accustomed to the call of tramps 
and travellers at this hour of noon, her countenance ex¬ 
pressed amazement to find the step so liberally occupied, 
and she stared at the visitors with as blank a look as if 
she had been asked a question in Old Testament history. 
Nor was her perplexity lessened when Mrs. Holmroyd, re¬ 
alizing her own ignorance of the family on which she 
called, sought on this subject to be informed. After a 
facial struggle with an intelligence so ill equipped for 
such a query that more than once it seemed the maid was 
on the point of leaving her interlocutor in order to refer 


THE COUNCILLOR 


153 


the subject to higher authority indoors, she replied to 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s question with the one word. “Bur- 
fords.” Burfords evidently signifying the plural. Mrs. 
Holmroyd felt thereupon emboldened (and the more so by 
reason of a now more noticeable smell of cookery) to en¬ 
quire if Mrs. Burford were at home. 

“There isn’t a Mrs. Burford,” the maid said after a 
struggle. “She’s dead.” The intelligence seemed tragic 
until, perhaps noting the shocked adjustment of Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s face, she modified its abruptness by saying: 
“She’s been dead a long while. She was dead when I 
came.” “There’s Mr. Burford,” she vouchsafed helpfully, 
“if you mean him . But he won’t be home while dinner.” 
She further added: “There’s Miss Burford . . and 
having communicated the information was gathered up 
into conflict with her own intelligence again. Indeed, 
all the while she held the door she appeared to be tor¬ 
mented by some secret intuition to shut it, and every time 
she spoke she seemed to lend ear to subtle atmospheric 
disturbances behind her as if a will were active in the ether 
whose messages she sought to pick up. In reply to Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s enquiry whether Miss Burford were at liberty 
the maid’s face suffered a spasm, accompanied by the 
words, “I’ll see.” For some moments her actions main¬ 
tained a conflict between closing and re-opening the door. 
Finally she compromised the difficulty by leaving it ajar, 
and was absent some considerable time—during which the 
smell of dinner grew frenetic. When next the maid re¬ 
turned she said in a repressed voice suitable to a house 
of mourning: “You’re to step inside.” She led the way 
past a pretentious mahogany hall-stand, radiating 
branches like a genealogical tree, from whose bristling 
pegs hung a couple of notably large and masculine felt 
hats above a big bluff-handled masculine umbrella that 
kept company with several substantial walking sticks, and 


154 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


introduced Mrs. Holmroyd to a room on the right of the 
entrance hall, saying in a voice now depressed to a whisper: 

“You’re to take a seat.” 

The room thus offered to the advancing visitors en¬ 
hanced the funereal atmosphere of their reception by the 
fact that its Venetian blinds were three parts drawn. 
Over the centre of the carpet a holland drugget had been 
spread, whilst most of the chairs were similarly draped, 
and the room was permeated with a fine haberdasher smell 
of stuffs and fabrics not yet deprived of their pristine 
odours by too frequent usage. Barely, however, had they 
time to seat themselves in accordance with the maid’s in¬ 
structions and take in the details of their surroundings 
before the door was pushed open again, and the maid’s 
head reappeared to utter the enquiry: 

“Miss Burford asks what name please.” 

She took the name dubiously, and the door—not closed 
immediately on her retirement—was pulled mysteriously 
to, a few minutes later, by an unseen hand. Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd fancied she heard the sound of acute whispers and a 
furtive footstep on the stair, succeeded by muffled sounds 
above, that might have been somebody making hasty jour¬ 
neys between a wardrobe and a dressing table in some bed¬ 
room overhead. But she told herself she was not paying 
attention to such things, being engaged in framing suitable 
expressions of regret for having called (she was disposed 
to fear) at a time so inconvenient; and composed her 
countenance to that benignant look expectant of nothing, 
with which cultured callers sit in wait. 

Whilst she sat thus the door opened swiftly, all at once, 
without warning, and a lady entered. In her hand she 
held a handkerchief whose formal stiffness suggested it 
had but this moment been shaken out of fold, which (on 
catching sight of Mrs. Holmroyd) she instantly applied 
to her nose and inclined her head over it with an air of 


THE COUNCILLOR 


155 


distance, as if she bowed across a garden hedge. The 
salmon-tinted flesh upon her face and neck reflected cook¬ 
ery ; her hair, drawn tightly from her brow and held in the 
grasp of a hard chignon behind the head, was sternly 
practical, suggesting that its owner viewed hair less as an 
object of adornment than of repression. How old she 
was seemed (in her particular respect) a question with¬ 
out relevance. Probably she had never been young. 
Her face was featureless; the dark broad eyebrows were 
its strongest though not perhaps its pleasantest charac¬ 
ter, beneath which the brown eyes moved with the restless 
activity of the hyperconscientious housekeeper. Almost 
their first act, after admitting Mrs. Holmroyd and her 
children into their brief area of recognition, was to make a 
rapid survey of the room, as if in search of domestic 
shortcomings. 

“Well! I declare! Excuse me. . . .” Without al¬ 
lowing Mrs. Holmroyd to explain the object of her visit 
she passed to the window and drew up the Venetian blinds, 
with a minute eye on the carpet to regulate the light ad¬ 
mitted by what its susceptible colours could with safety 
bear, smoothing the curtains at the same time with rapid 
touches of imperfect satisfaction as if her fingers burned 
to do their work more thoroughly than the constraint of 
visitors allowed. “Whatever is the girl thinking of! To 
leave visitors sitting in the dark.” She begged Mrs. 
Holmroyd to pardon the untidiness of the room into which 
she had been shown, and the disgraceful state in which 
she found everything. “I must ask you to excuse us, 
please. My maid is new. Well . . . new! I have had 
her three weeks. But she is no better now than when she 
came. She seems to have no idea. This room ought to 
have been thoroughly turned out yesterday. It was my 
day for it. But of course ... in view of the fu¬ 
neral . . .” She looked at Mrs. Holmroyd, who ex- 


156 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


pressed her sympathetic understanding of the situation. 
“. . . The room had to be left. I really don’t know 
whenever we shall get straight with the house again.” 

She smoothed the holland covering of the sofa and 
seated herself out of politeness to her visitor, with more 
concern for the cushions than if they had been human 
feelings. But it was plain to see this act of sitting was 
a mockery, imposing only an irksome restraint upon a 
nature so practical and energetic. Her interest, dis¬ 
tracted between the exigencies of politeness and the con¬ 
cerns of housekeeping, came to an abrupt standstill at 
mention of the solitaire, which, Mrs. Holmroyd said: “I 
understand you to have lost, Miss Burford.” Miss Bur- 
ford disclaimed ownership in so far as herself was con¬ 
cerned with an asperity that seemed to defend her common- 
sense against the charge of being responsible for such a 
loss, saying she knew and had prophesied how it would be. 

The solitaire, it seemed, belonged to her father—“Coun¬ 
cillor Burford,” she explained, adding the civic title for 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s enlightenment and her own gratification, 
and stanching pride with her pocket handkerchief that the 
information might have a moment’s grace in which to sink 
into her visitor’s intelligence. Only the previous Sun¬ 
day, it transpired, the solitaire had been found on the 
dining-room carpet by the maid. “And as I told my 
father: if it could be dropped on the carpet in the dining¬ 
room, it could be dropped anywhere. He has,” she added, 
with a bridling of satisfaction, “a second pair for business. 
Why couldn’t he have worn those! They are quite good 
ones. To be sure, Alderman Bankett was an old friend. 
We have known him a number of years.” Having thus 
demonstrated the superiority of her feminine intelligence 
at the expense of her parent, she broke off to enquire: 
“Do you say the stud has been found?” Mrs. Holmroyd 
said, “I think my little boy has had the pleasure of find- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


157 


ing Mr. Burford’s stud. I hope it may be so.—Oswald!” 

Thus prompted, Oswald rose mutely from the chair 
edge on which he had reseated himself after Miss Bur- 
ford’s entrance, and timidly produced the box containing 
his discovery. Taking the proffered box with more 
anxiety than thankfulness, Miss Burford undid the care¬ 
ful wrappings in which the treasure was preserved. Her 
fingers, strong and resolutely active, seemed perfect in¬ 
struments of precision. Before the stud was half unclad, 
her face, darkened during the early operations, lit up with 
a gleam of certainty. Yes. She was sure. She could 
tell. She extracted the trophy with the triumph of a 
dentist for a tooth. It was her father’s stud. 

Gratification at its recovery came only second (one 
could see) to that for the victory won by wisdom. With 
this damning piece of evidence she would be able in due 
course to confront parental folly and justify all her 
prophetic asperities. But the look of righteous triumph 
gave way to a startling change of expression induced (as 
it appeared) by some disturbance that her microphonic 
hearing recorded in a remote part of the house. She 
elevated the stud with a dramatic gesture, imposing silence. 

“There! Did you hear that? What is she up to? I 
told her. Particularly. Excuse me, please. One mo¬ 
ment.” Laying the stud incontinently on the sofa, she 
passed swiftly out of the room. After a brief absence 
Miss Burford returned with the same swiftness that had 
borne her away; her mouth distorted by what Oswald at 
first mistook for a smile, but which at close quarters 
showed itself to be something infinitely more complex and 
superior; being, in fact, the ineffable expression which 
confirms, on the part of prophetic wisdom, the realization 
of its worst fears. Miss Burford’s ear had not deceived 
her. She had known. She had expected it. One of her 
large, last new dinner plates. No thanks to the maid it 


158 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


had not been the meat dish. And she had expressly told 
the girl. Her very last words before coming into the 
room had been: “Don’t go and break anything whilst 
I’m gone.” 

With an uncomfortable sense of being, indirectly, 
responsible for this catastrophe, Mrs. Holmroyd expressed 
her deep regret, coupled with renewed apologies for hav¬ 
ing disturbed Miss Burford at so inopportune a time; 
which, she explained, was in her own case less of choice 
than of necessity. Accused by the delicate politeness of 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s voice and the ladylike grace with which 
she now prepared to take her leave, Miss Burford sum¬ 
moned all her forces of gentility. Her visitor must please 
excuse a state of things for which her kindness was not 
at all to blame. 

“I am afraid I have not even thanked you for your 
trouble,” she said, and asked a number of questions with 
regard to the finding of the solitaire. After Mrs. Holm- 
royd, with an occasional reference to Oswald, had told her, 
“I believe . . .” Miss Burford said, assuming a perceptible 
control over the edges of her mouth, “I am not quite sure. 
I rather fancy Mr. Burford entertained some thought 
. . . of offering a slight reward. I don’t know whether 
he has done so. Half a crown, I think, was in his mind. 
Not more.” 

Parrying the suggestion with evasive eyes and a 
quickening of the voice, Mrs. Holmroyd begged Miss 
Burford not to mention it. “You are very kind. . . . 
But it is quite unnecessary.” 

Miss Burford’s mouth, pursed until then, appeared to 
derive confidence from her visitor’s polite refusal, and re¬ 
gained a measure of its arrested volubility. 

“Some small acknowledgment,” she pleaded. “I feel 
sure Mr. Burford . . . But of course. If you would 
rather. Still . . . after all your little boy’s trouble. 


THE COUNCILLOR 


159 


Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least ... a 
shilling?” 

The little boy in question, being brought by these words 
directly under the influence of the heavy brows, dropped 
his eyes and relapsed discreetly into the arms of Provi¬ 
dence. For, gentleman though he was; gentleman though 
he always strove to be, his heart beat in a cage of mortal 
clay. The reward had dwindled from half a crown to a 
single shilling. Did this sweeping reduction constitute so 
great a change in the intrinsic nature of the sum as now 
to reconcile it with gentility? It did not. His mother’s 
voice deprived the visionary coin of its last value. One 
shilling melted, like the substance of life itself, to nothing; 
a dead hope diffusing a sad autumnal odour; a memory to 
be trodden underfoot like the beech leaves in the Burford 
garden. All that was offered to him was a hard, dry hand 
that he moved mechanically up and down like a pump 
handle and relinquished. As they passed into the tepid 
outer sunlight and paid Miss Burford the final courtesies 
of leave-taking, she said to Mrs. Holmroyd. “Pardon 
me. . . . I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what name you gave. 
It was on my tongue when I came into the room. Not 
Hanson? To be sure! Holmroyd! What was I thinking 
of!—You don’t happen to know of a good servant, do you, 
Mrs. Holmroyd?” Mrs. Holmroyd, to her great regret, 
did not. With a few more words of thanks and superficial 
tributes to the mildness of the weather, they parted. 
Mrs. Holmroyd, shepherding her children in front of her, 
moved towards the garden gate. Miss Burford holding 
the door open no longer than sufficed to show her the 
visitors’ backs, closed it with an alacrity and silence al¬ 
most sinister, and betook herself to the room just vacated 
at such a rate as to reach its window before the gate had 
closed upon them; from which point of vantage she sub¬ 
jected their persons to the dark and searching scrutiny 


160 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


that in their presence politeness had denied her. Nor did 
she relax the tightened guiders of her neck until they 
were no longer visible, when she instantly let down the 
blinds and went in turn to the seats her visitors had sat 
on; effacing the impress of their bodies from the holland 
covers with a critical hand, and even stooping to investi¬ 
gate the places where their feet had been. After which, 
and many touches of adjustment to the furniture—so 
minute as to produce no effect perceptible to any eye but 
hers, she left the room with an expression of disgust and 
proceeded to seek an outlet for her indignation in the 
kitchen. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Holmroyd and her children walked 
back towards the town. They had but shortly left the 
Rockery House behind them, and were indeed still con¬ 
tained in the retrospective silence of their thoughts, when 
they encountered two substantial men—City Fathers, one 
might have guessed them at a glance—walking corpo¬ 
rately abreast. The outer of these two, who stepped mo¬ 
mentarily off the kerb to offer Mrs. Holmroyd better 
passage, having noted already the house they came from, 
bestowed a keen glance of enquiry on them as they went 
by. A few moments later, Oswald (stealing a backward 
look at these two figures that were so reminiscent of yes¬ 
terday) was much stirred by the fact that they were come 
to a standstill before the very gate his own hand had just 
now punctiliously closed, and he imparted the intelligence 
to his mother in an excited undertone. Beryl spun round 
on her muff at once, and was not less agitated with what 
she saw, exclaiming: “Mother, see! They’re both look¬ 
ing after us.” Mrs. Holmroyd, walking with her head 
more consciously erect, and a higher colour in her cheek, 
reproached her children gently for the impropriety of an 
act whose tragic effect on Lot’s wife should furnish a les¬ 
son for all time. 


THE COUNCILLOR 


161 


Within, her pride reiterated: “A Shilling!” 

. . Perhaps you would allow me to give him at least 
. . . a shilling.” 


3 

That same afternoon, shortly after the little school had 
resumed its studies, there came a knock at Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s street door. All the scholars looked up with one 
accord to cry in chorus: “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, 
there’s a knock at the door.” In which way they recited 
most of the happenings in the house and neighbourhood. 
“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, somebody’s just put something 
through the letter-box.” “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, the 
rag and bone man’s going by.” “Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, 
there’s a milk cart.” From time to time, too, it was the 
custom of their friends and relations to call during the 
course of study, to ask if one or other of the students 
might be liberated to pay some visit or to take a walk. 
A knock at the door, therefore, was always pregnant with 
possibilities and very welcome, and Mrs. Holmroyd had 
never any lack of volunteers to answer the summons on 
such occasions. This afternoon she turned her eye on 
Oswald, who rose obedient to the silent bidding and went 
downstairs. Filled with speculation, he opened the front 
door. No daylight came in with it. A wall of darkness 
seemed to seal the door-frame up and block his outlook 
to the street beyond. He found himself beneath the 
shadow of a human shape which appeared to be standing 
with its back towards the door, and as though made con¬ 
scious of its opening by the inward suction of air, turned 
round to proclaim itself no less a personage than the 
gentleman who had moved off the causeway this morning, 
and whom Oswald had seen (on looking back) with his 
hand upon the gate of Briar Dene. 


162 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


At close quarters, measured against a doorway that 
gave passage to Oswald’s person with such liberal space 
to spare, he seemed enormously enlarged. Across his 
waistcoat there swung a heavy chain of gold on a level 
with Oswald’s forehead, revealed to view by the fact that 
both his coat and overcoat were worn unbuttoned. He 
had a close-cropped square-cut beard in which black hairs 
and grey contested on equal terms; and his eyebrows, in 
which black still predominated, bore a striking resem¬ 
blance to those before which Oswald had lowered his gaze 
in the holland-draped drawing-room this morning. “Now, 
my lad!” he addressed Oswald, “Does Mrs. Holmroyd live 
here?” The voice though blunt and businesslike was not 
unkindly. It dispensed unceremoniously with the letter 
H in both “Holmroyd” and “here,” and yet seemed not 
altogether devoid of a sort of authoritative substitute for 
the aspirate; a sort of assumptive H in the speaker’s eye 
and bearing; as if his dignity could not descend to humour 
the whims of words, which, for his usage must be broad 
and free of finery, built for solid wear and tear like the 
boots he stood in. 

Oswald said politely that this was the house where 
Mrs. Holmroyd lived. 

“Tell her,” the figure instructed him, “Councillor Bur- 
ford would like a word with her.” 

Thereupon, by rights, Oswald should have invited the 
owner of the name in a clear voice to enter, but whilst 
being perfectly lucid as to this part of his duty he felt 
the most inexpressible helplessness for the performance of 
it, being temporarily under the influence of the conduct 
of Councillor Burford’s own maidservant in a similar 
predicament this morning. Hardly knowing what pre¬ 
cise step might now be expected of him he therefore 
opened the door to its widest extent, and flattening him¬ 
self against the passage wall, by this means and a timid 


THE COUNCILLOR 


163 


supplication of eye besought the Councillor to enter— 
which the Councillor did forthwith in a very deliberate 
and impressive manner, filling the passage so completely 
that Oswald had for safety to turn his nose sideways as 
the visitor brushed by. Nor could he, pinned against 
the wall by the Councillor’s broad shoulders, extricate 
himself from this painful position in order to close the 
door, for the Councillor, taking stock of his new sur¬ 
roundings with the critical absorption particular to a 
man of property, appeared to be oblivious of Oswald 
and the obstruction his own figure caused. Nothing, 
Oswald knew, constituted a grosser breach of politeness 
than to force one’s way past stationary individuals, but 
the situation was rapidly becoming desperate, and at last 
he was left with no alternative but to dive below the 
spreading skirts of the overcoat, whence he emerged pal¬ 
pitating on the farther side. Arrived there, it had been 
his purpose to throw open the parlour door, but a simul¬ 
taneous movement of the Councillor served to block this 
avenue in turn, and Oswald solved a difficulty now be¬ 
come insuperable by running upstairs. 

“ . . . Councillor Burford, mother.” 

She assumed appropriate surprise. “Councillor Bur- 
ford, Oswald? Are you sure?” Yes. He was sure. So 
sure, indeed, that his head turned uncontrollably towards 
the landing, expectant every moment of a heavy tread. 
The look betrayed him to his mother, whom it prompted 
anxiously to ask: “Where is Councillor Burford, Os¬ 
wald?”—and reading the truth from the open page of her 
son’s silence: “You’ve never left him standing in the pas¬ 
sage, dear? O, go dowm at once, Oswald, and show him 
into the room.” Nevertheless her movements were so 
swift—or perhaps Oswald’s descending footsteps lagged 
a little—that she greeted her visitor in the passage before 
he had disappeared through the parlour door which Os- 


164 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


wald held open for him. The Councillor still wore his 
square felt hat, as if imbued with the opinion that a pas¬ 
sage entrance constituted no integral part of a house, and 
that to uncover the head in such a neutral space was a 
foolish waste of politeness; but he doffed it the moment 
Mrs. Holmroyd came down the stairs, saying “Good after¬ 
noon, ma’am,” in a voice that Oswald envied. “I’ve not 
called to intrude upon your time, ma’am,” he said. “But 
from what my daughter tells me I believe it’s you I’ve got 
to thank for bringing back that stud, and I felt I must 
just look round on my way to business to let you know 
I’m very much obliged. I rather fancy I met you as you 
was coming away from my house this morning, but of 
course I hadn’t the pleasure of knowing who you was, at 
the time.” 

He broke the laws of grammar with the same resolute 
authoritative air with which he disregarded aspirates, yet 
the sound of the fault was less flagrant than any attempt 
at its written representation may convey. A character 
of rugged confidence in himself condoned to some extent 
his misuse of the mother-tongue, which he ordered with the 
brusque assurance of one used to be obeyed, and without 
compromise treated language as his servant and not his 
master. 

“Of course . . . you’d know I’d offered a reward,” he 
told Mrs. Holmroyd. “Five shillings was the sum I’d 
fixed in my mind. But my daughter tells me she couldn’t 
prevail on you to accept nothing.” He paused there as 
though to offer Mrs. Holmroyd an opening for any change 
of mind upon the subject, and reading unaltered resolu¬ 
tion on her lips passed on: “So there’s no more to be 
said. Except that I’m very much obliged to you, ma’am. 
Very much obliged, I’m sure.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd expressed herself obliged in turn for 
the Councillor’s visit, modestly renouncing at the same 


THE COUNCILLOR 


165 


time all credit for the stud’s recovery in favour of her 
son, upon whom the Councillor turned an eye intended to 
be encouraging, but which, dissociated from any smile that 
Oswald could discover, proved a heavier and more em¬ 
barrassing burden than his own eye could support without 
flinching; more especially as, after a period of silent in¬ 
spection, the Councillor apostrophized him “Young man” 
with the enquiry, What school he went to? 

The question involved some difficulty. Strictly speak¬ 
ing, Oswald went to no school—as himself was painfully 
aware; being already arrived at the outer fringe of that 
inward state of mind which shirks admission of the shame¬ 
ful fact of being educated at home in conjunction with a 
younger sister and infants of both sexes. All his school¬ 
ing pertained to the future. He looked beseechingly at 
his mother for guidance in perplexity. 

“ . . . Just at present,” Mrs. Holmroyd interposed, 
and never was the sound of clarid water more welcome to 
thirsty soul than the gracious clearness of her voice to 
Oswald, “he does not go to any school.” Perhaps she 
felt as Oswald did the nakedness of the fact exposed thus 
feebly to the scrutiny of the dark brows bent upon it, for 
she threw over its frail limbs the phrase: “He is rather 
delicate.” It was a phrase Oswald had heard before, and 
in the same conjunction, that served as a sort of 
swaddling-cloth to truth. He stole a glance beneath his 
lashes at the dark Councillor to see what effect the state¬ 
ment made upon him; and, not without a certain pride to 
be possessed of such indifferent health, assumed a posture 
of delicacy in keeping with it. “He is only twelve,” he 
heard his mother say. “For the present I am educating 
him at home . . . where,” she forced her lips to add, “I 
have a small school of my own. It is chiefly intended for 
delicate children who need rather more care and considera¬ 
tion than could be given them elsewhere.” The Council- 


166 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


lor contributed a terse “Indeed!” in a voice that seemed 
to own small sympathy with the needs of sickly childhood. 
Oswald, still bearing the burden of the visitor’s regard, 
had an uncomfortable belief that it lay on him with a de¬ 
gree of disapproval only short of anger. At least the 
dark grey beard baffled him, giving access to no human ex¬ 
pression that Oswald’s eyes could decipher in the rapid 
reference made to it. He therefore strove to reach the 
visitor’s softer feelings by a demeanour of sadness. 

“Later on . . .” Oswald was relieved to hear his mother 
say, “he will (of course) go to the Grammar School.” 
There was an air of fine conclusiveness about the state¬ 
ment, and particularly about the interpolated “of course” 
that surprised even Oswald. Never had he heard his 
mother allude to his scholastic future in such emphatic 
terms. It was true, then! Perhaps he would be going 
next term. There seemed something so masculine and 
vigourous about the thought of going to the Grammar 
School that delicacy seemed altogether incompatible with 
it. Whereupon he threw aside his facial sadness and the 
wasted attitude symbolic of weak health and assumed a 
convalescent, more heroic, mien which (surely) could not 
fail to commend itself to a spectator of such powerful 
discernment. But the Councillor only said “Indeed!” 
once more. “What’s he going to make, ma’am?” he 
asked—a question so irrelevant and difficult to answer that 
Oswald could but repeat it to himself with silent lips, 
keeping a sharp eye on his mother’s face. 

“It is rather early to think about that just yet,” Mrs. 
Holmroyd remarked with indulgence. 

“Not too early, if he means to make a good start, 
ma’am,” the Councillor declared. “They can’t begin too 
young. That’s my opinion, and I begun young myself— 
so I know. Make up your mind as soon as possible, 


THE COUNCILLOR 167 

m’lad,” he said, addressing Oswald, “and then stick to it. 
No chopping and changing. It’s the only way.” 

The counsel was intended, doubtless, to display inter¬ 
est and good-will, and to bestow upon the finder of the 
solitaire, in lieu of silver, some solid piece of golden wis¬ 
dom from one whose office lent a special weight and value 
to what he uttered. But the words tapped Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s conscience accusingly. They shocked her heart 
with a sudden alarm as though her son’s life had been 
threatened by a passing cab. 

“He sings in the choir at St. Saviour’s,” she made haste 
to say defensively. “He is a voluntary member. And 
he helps me at home, too,” she added, feeling that the 
earlier testimonial found less favour in the Councillor’s 
eyes than she had hoped. “He is most useful to me.” 
Oswald’s pride, stirred not less by this tribute to his use¬ 
fulness, overwelled the lips of silence all at once and be¬ 
came speech. 

“I go errands on Friday,” he said, “and on Saturday 
as well.” He shaped the words shyly, offering the in¬ 
formation not to Councillor Burford, whom he lacked 
courage directly to address, but (though not looking at 
her) to his mother. “With the basket.” 

“Errands, do you?” said the Councillor, his interest at 
once excited by this practical and familiar word. “What 
sort of errands? Who for?” 

“Only for me,” Mrs. Holmroyd answered quickly, with 
a flush that seemed to wish to interpose itself between the 
present conversation and some topic feared. But the 
fatal word “pork-pie” had already escaped from Oswald’s 
custody, and the Councillor’s gaze, directed on her across 
the upturned brim of his extended hat, seemed to demand 
an explanation. She gave it hurriedly, her words stum¬ 
bling somewhat in the act. “I do not bake many. Only 


168 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


a few . . . for those who, who care for home-made pies.” 

“Pork-pies!” said the Councillor, tersely, but with in¬ 
terest. “What’s the price of ’em?” 

Of all questions it was the one she dreaded most. 

“It depends,” she said evasively, “. . . upon the size. 
I make them in several sizes. Some of my—” “customers” 
she could not bring her lips to call them; “clients” was 
no woman’s word; “acquaintances” made the commerce 
too promiscuous; “friends,” in this delicate connotation, 
seemed the only title left to her. “Some of my friends 
prefer a large pie, and some a small.” 

“What’s the price of your small?” her visitor 
demanded. 

She took a breath and murmured: “Eighteen pence.” 
Her eyelids flickered. She hated prices more than pies. 
She could give; she found it hard to take. To pay was 
gracious; to be paid, shameful. 

“Eighteen pence,” repeated her visitor. He uttered 
the price so openly, and with so little recognition of its 
shameful inner meaning, that her heart took courage. 
And to this stolid Councillor figures were the fundamental 
facts of life; the principle underlying all reality. He 
saw no shame in them; they formed the basis of existence. 
They were, for him, the test of character; the very mak¬ 
ing of a man. And if Mrs. Holmroyd blushed—as blush 
she did—to breathe her eighteen pence, the blush was 
wasted. Eighteen pence, the Councillor’s face appeared 
to testify, was a very respectable, substantial, well- 
established figure; a sum not to be despised or treated 
lightly even by a prosperous member of the Daneborough 
Town Council. “Eighteen pence,” said he again, as if 
this were a financial matter calling for deliberation. 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s chief fear was that he would straightway 
place an order for a pie. Not because his appetite per¬ 
suaded, but because she had been good enough to decline 


THE COUNCILLOR 


169 


his proffered reward. But in this, too, her irresponsible 
finer feelings played her false. For, having said “Ah!” 
and “Indeed!” with great spaciousness, the Councillor di¬ 
rected his attention suddenly towards his hat, as if it 
had spoken to him, and said: “But I mustn’t detain you 
any longer, ma’am. You’ve your business to think of, 
and so have I.” With wdiich, wishing Mrs. Holmroyd 
good-afternoon, and thanking her again (ma’am) he 
turned to go. Mrs. Holmroyd prompted her son: “Os¬ 
wald, dear . . .” and Oswald, quitting the company of 
the chair his politeness had brought forward for the 
Councillor’s reception, hastened to reach the front door 
in advance of the departing figure. But the broad 
shoulders and spreading overcoat effectually filled the 
passage, to the obstruction of all politeness; and their 
visitor let himself out without any rearward look. That 
he was not unaware of Oswald’s activity in the back- 
draught of his ample skirts seemed indicated by the fact 
that he left the door open behind him as though for this 
ensuing hand to close, and betook himself gravely down 
the street. 


4 

On Friday, Councillor Burford called again. He did 
not present himself as before, during academic hours, but 
on his way home to tea, which with him, as with most of 
the City Fathers, was a substantial repast exhaling the 
odours of hot meats. The little Spring Bank household 
was already seated at its modest meal. The scholars were 
dispersed for the week-end; the schoolroom was a place 
of echoes only, whispering round a defunct fire in a 
shrinking grate. But the sitting-room beneath, despite 
the patent scantiness of furniture, diffused a homely com¬ 
fort ; its avails and ceiling reciprocating the flickers of a 


170 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


cheerful fire, small, but ruddy red and stout of heart, that 
put out tongues of flame and piped, from time to time, 
exuberant music through the bars on flageolets of smoke. 

The solemn footsteps arrested at the street door caused 
the little family to suspend its eating and seek each other’s 
eyes. Beryl cried: “Who’s that!” Oswald stared 
mutely over his teacup. Mrs. Holmroyd said: “I can’t 
think who it will be ... at this time. It is too early 
for the post.” But she knew it was Councillor Burford. 
She laid a restraining hand on Beryl’s wrist, already mak¬ 
ing preparations for a descent from her high chair. 
“Oswald will go, dear.” She lit another gas. 

“Now m’lad.” 

Yes. It was Councillor Burford’s voice that echoed in 
the narrow passage. Intuition had not deceived her. 

“Is your mother at home?” Oswald’s answer w r as not 
audible, but they heard a leisurely foot introduced into 
the passage, and straightway the passage seemed to be 
choked with a gigantic presence rubbing both its walls. 
Mrs. Holmroyd hastily set down her teacup, half turning 
to the door. For Oswald had left this open, and the 
visitor, catching her eye over the descending teacup, drew 
back with apologies. 

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Your son didn’t tell me 
you was at tea.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd assured him that no apology was neces¬ 
sary, their tea being nearly over—a statement that caused 
Beryl’s eyes to make a startled tour of plates and dishes. 

“Please come in, Mr. Burford, and excuse the tea-table. 
This is our only room.” 

“I aren’t going to disturb you,” said the Councillor, 
removing his hat, which he appeared to have the habit of 
retaining until the last possible moment. “I’m just on 
my way home to tea myself.” And saying this, as if it 
implied a resolution to advance no further, he stepped 


THE COUNCILLOR 


171 


across the threshold and moved to the fireplace, where, 
planted firmly with his broad back towards its blaze, and 
the square felt hat held out brim uppermost in his large 
hand, he took a comprehensive survey of the accessories 
of Mrs. Holmroyd’s table; the teapot, the hot water jug, 
the jar of home-made jam, the sweet cake, the bread and 
butter and toast. The regard was leisurely and undis¬ 
guised, and yet (to do it justice) it lacked all quality of 
rudeness. On the contrary, this overt look, which no 
more respected the finnicking conventions of politeness 
than his lips flattered language, or his dress paid toll to 
the follies of fashion, possessed a character of reassurance, 
as though his eyes were not displeased with what they 
saw. Indeed, one object on the table so far attracted his 
admiration as to cause him to indicate it by means of a 
movement of his hat. 

“That’s a nice cream jug you’ve got there, ma’am.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes fell upon it, and a flush (born 
not of gratification alone) crept into her face. 

“It belonged to my grandmother, Mr. Burford,” she 
said. She did not add that it had belonged to someone 
else, less connected with the family, since then, but the 
doleful thought was in her mind, and under pretext of 
touching the admired object with a soft, appreciative 
finger, she evaded the visitor’s glance. For there was 
something in the weight of it disconcerting to sensitive 
memories. But the remark, surely, had been no more 
than a coincidence. 

“Do you use it every day then, ma’am?” the Councillor 
enquired. 

She answered “Yes. ... At least, nearly every day,” 
for Beryl was looking at her now, and eyes of innocence 
shine with such insufferable wisdom at times. “It makes 
a pleasant change.” 

The Councillor remarked, “Indeed!” In its dryness 


172 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


and angularity the word seemed curiously reminiscent of 
the figure of his daughter, who, as if evoked by it, rose 
up ghostly between them. Mrs. Holmroyd understood 
the significance of the comment. It implied that no such 
piece of silver would be degraded into common service on 
Miss Burford’s table. But whether she stood rebuked or 
favoured by the comparison nothing in the Councillor’s 
face betrayed. He left the topic as abruptly as he had 
approached it, and his next words showed him to be far 
away in thought. 

“About those pies, ma’am. Did I understand you to 
say you was baking on Fridays?” 

A slight flush rose to Mrs. Holmroyd’s face as she 
acknowledged the task and day. 

“I thought I hadn’t been mistook,” said the Councillor. 
“I’ve been talking it over with my daughter, and we’ve 
decided to give your pies a trial. We’ll begin with a small 
one, to see how we like it. If that’s satisfactory perhaps 
some time we’ll try another.” 

There was a cautiousness about the order, intensified 
by its association with Miss Burford—as if this hard- 
faced lady had been a witness of Mrs. Holmroyd’s dis¬ 
comfiture—that stung her pride. But the offence charge¬ 
able in the Councillor’s words seemed to infect his answer 
not at all. He faced her with the straightforward mien 
of one neither intending nor suspecting offence. 

“Eighteen pence I think you said it was, ma’am,” the 
Councillor remarked, and thrust a large hand into his 
trousers’ pocket, where some loose coinage disturbed by 
its intrusion made a painful jingle. 

“0, please do not trouble about that, Mr. Burford,” 
she protested, “anytime will do. In fact, I would pre¬ 
fer . . What precisely she would prefer remained un¬ 
spoken. But the large hand groping in the spacious 


THE COUNCILLOR 


173 


pocket ceased its activities at once, as if (to be sure) 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s suggestion were a wise one. 

“Just as you like ma’am,” the Councillor obliged her. 
“You can have the money now, or you can have it later. 
Why, as far as that goes,” he reflected, “perhaps, if 
you’re agreeable, we might work it off by contra. It’ll 
be as good a way as any. You’ll be wanting groceries, 
I suppose. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice, sago, baking powder,” 
—he ran through a glib list of domestic necessaries, in¬ 
cluding some prime Wiltshire and several recommendable 
sorts of cheese. “I only keep the very best, ma’am. It 
pays me, and it pays my customers best in the long run. 
I don’t think I’ve been favoured with any of your custom 
up to the present, but I shall always be happy to serve 
you. Or anybody. For choice and quality I’ve a busi¬ 
ness that takes second place to none in Daneborough.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd betrayed a soft confusion in acknowl¬ 
edgment of her neglect of the Councillor’s business. It 
was true she had had no dealings with him up to the 
present. But she excused this apparent discourtesy by 
alleging the smallness of her needs. 

“That may be,” said the Councillor, obviously deter¬ 
mined to see in their smallness no bar to custom, 
“. . . but they mount up. Business is business, and 
there’s no call for you to buy a pennorth more of me 
than you want, just because I’ve a bigger stock to pick 
from. I’m ready to supply the big orders, and I’m 
ready to supply the small. There’s no difference in the 
quality whether you want much or little. If you’re 
satisfied where you are, ma’am,” the Councillor said with 
a fine display of magnanimity, “why! stay where you are. 
I don’t want to interfere with nobody else’s trade.” 
Mrs. Holmroyd breathed her appreciation of this laud¬ 
able sentiment. 


174 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“But if,” he added, with a more decisive tone, as though 
perhaps afraid his recent toleration might be misinter¬ 
preted, “you think there’s anything in the grocery line 
could be improved on, why! I shall be glad to see you, 
ma’am. There’s not many customers comes to me once 
but what they come again. I aren’t in the habit of 
losing them.” 

The matter was agreed. On the basis of a contra 
account established by virtue of an eighteenpenny pie, 
Mrs. Holmroyd consented to give the Burford shop a 
trial. His solicitation of her custom flattered vanity, 
and his sturdy handling of the subject put her gratefully 
at ease. Where herself approached the topic of her 
livelihood with shame, this borough councillor marched 
squarely to the subject of business with a tread as firm as 
that which took him to the Mansion House. 

“And before I forget,” said the Councillor, rubbing a 
sleeve round the circumference of his hat. “Did I under¬ 
stand you, or somebody else, to say anything about a 
school?” 

Profiting by the lesson just received, and the resolution 
built on it, Mrs. Holmroyd lost no time in confessing her 
ownership of the little school. 

“What’s your terms, ma’am?” the Councillor enquired. 

She was not yet, it seemed, so proficient in the new 
culture as to be capable of quoting terms without hesita¬ 
tion and a momentary dropping of the eyes. But she 
only dropped them to the table edge, which she stroked 
with a soft motion of the hand as if to mitigate the 
harshness of the sum mentioned. Thirty shillings, in 
short, the sum was. 

“Per Term or Quarter, ma’am?” the Councillor asked 
her. She answered “Term” with the added comment 
that, reckoned quarterly, the sum amounted (virtually) 
to a pound. “How do you make that out?” the Coun- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


175 


cillor corrected. “Three thirties is ninety; ninety’s four 
pound ten. There’s a matter of ten shilling difference, 
ma’am.” She agreed instantly. To be sure. Mr. 
Burford was quite right. Of course. . . . And stroked 
the table edge again. It was another lesson in prac¬ 
ticality that she must take to heart. Actuated by which 
resolve, inasmuch as the Councillor’s last word had been 
“Indeed!” and nothing more favourable to thirty shillings 
had passed his beard since then, she said: “Of course 
... in the event of two pupils from one family . . .” 

“Aye, but it isn’t two,” the Councillor disillusioned 
her promptly. “It’s only one. In fact, it’s not even 
that. It’s an enquiry. That’s all it is.” Mrs. Holm- 
royd quite understood the situation, and expected nothing 
more of it than had actually transpired. At the same 
time, if Mr. Burford thought that the terras mentioned 
were more, perhaps, than those he had in mind would be 
disposed to entertain, she might consider some small . . . 

But to her disappointment the Councillor flatly with¬ 
stood this hint of a reduction; “Terms is terms, ma’am,” 
he said uncompromisingly. “And if folks doesn’t feel 
inclined to pay ’em that’s no reason why you should make 
’em any less. It isn’t business. You could have as many 
pupils as you liked if you’d take ’em for nothing.” He 
delivered the homily with the terse satisfaction of a man 
who takes pride in his own common-sense, displaying it 
for Mrs. Holmroyd’s edification as Miss Burford might 
have shown the furniture reflective of her care. And 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s agreement seemed so emphatically as¬ 
sumed in what he said that she could do no other than 
assent to it, albeit this subscription to a fixed and ar¬ 
bitrary price caused her dependence to quake as if the 
principle thus put into her hand for self-defence had been 
a fire-arm which (even in extremity) she doubted her 
courage to discharge. Nor was her faith in its pro- 


176 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


tectiveness increased when the Councillor, still talking 
over his extended hat, went on to say that in the case 
under consideration “Probably it wouldn’t make a 
ha’porth of difference if you reduced your terms or not. 
There’s so many schools nowadays, ma’am. Here’s all 
the Church schools and the Corporation schools and the 
English schools and the Grammar School and private 
schools in every street. People can have edjication for 
nothing nowadays, and when they can get it for nothing 
it’s not very likely they want to pay for it.” Not, he 
explained in a tone displaying some slight, but only 
slight, consideration for Mrs. Holmroyd’s academic feel¬ 
ings, that he was in favour of all this Edjication himself. 
“It’s overdone, ma’am. There’s too much of it. It’s a 
craze. People seems to think edjication’s going to be a 
cure for everything. It’s not. What it does in nine 
cases out of ten is to fill folks’ heads with nonsense. 
They’d rather waste their time learning things they can’t 
understand and wouldn’t be no good to ’em if they did, 
than turn to honest work and do the things they can. 
Where’s all the domestic servants and shop assistants 
going to, ma’am, since edjication’s been introduced? 
Here’s my daughter, ma’am. She gets a servant in one 
day, and the girl’s mother comes to fetch her box the 
next. Why? Just because my daughter expects to have 
things clean and decent. Some day there won’t be any 
servants to be had. They’ll all be milliners and school¬ 
teachers. That’s what edjication’s got to answer for.” 

In the instant of departure the observant eyes that had 
more than once rested on Beryl’s solemnly uplifted face 
in their constant journeys round the room, admitted her 
to a glance of definite recognition at last. 

“Your daughter, ma’am?” he made enquiry. 

Mrs. Holmroyd, gratified with his notice of her child, 
said “Yes,” and lit up the object of his attention with an 


THE COUNCILLOR 


ITT 


indulgent smile as though commending it under this 
favourable light to the Councillor’s regard. 

“You’ve only these two, then,” Mr. Burford remarked; 
and when she had confirmed the number: “Let’s see,” said 
he, “I think I’m right in supposing you’ve lost your hus¬ 
band, ma’am?” If she had not answered him by words, 
the look of sorrowing admission with which her face 
adapted itself to the enquiry would have spoken for her. 

“He has been dead . . . nearly two years,” she said 
softly; and the impulse proving too strong for her de¬ 
votion to withstand, she could not refrain from calling 
attention to the presentment of the best of husbands. 

“That is his photograph on the mantelpiece . . . just 
behind you, Mr. Burford. It does not do him justice.” 

He turned hat in hand, and gazed a moment on it; 
she, intently watching. But his only comment was an 
ultimate “Indeed!” which, truth to tell, proved poor 
requital for the needs of love. 

“I’ll bid you good evening, ma’am,” the Councillor said, 
turning from this melancholy topic to matter of fact 
with evident relief. “Don’t disturb yourself. I know 
my way out.” To Oswald, awaiting him in the doorway 
he said, “Well m’lad! Have you thought any more about 
what I told you? Have you made up your mind yet?” 

With burning ears Oswald had to confess the shameful 
fact “Not yet,” being so completely unprepared for a 
repetition of this perplexing question as to have no other 
answer ready for it. “It’s time you did,” the Councillor 
admonished him. “Every day you lose you’re letting 
some smarter lad get a start of you.” It was a terrify¬ 
ing reflection, that shook the fabric of Oswald’s peace of 
mind. He wished he could decide whether their newly 
made acquaintance spoke sportively or in earnest. But 
the square beard divulged no secrets, and for Oswald’s 
age humour is as a locked door unless a smile be the key 


178 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to it. The broad conciliar figure launched itself from 
the doorway and merged its contours into the gathering 
mist. Quick! Let this door be closed; let the closer of 
it hasten back to the parlour; let him find his gloves, his 
muffler, cap and overcoat, and begin without a moment’s 
waste to overtake this constant stream of smarter boys 
whom each succeeding second of inertia saw started on 
the road to fame ahead of him. 

5 

On Saturday there was no school. The restless move¬ 
ments of imprisoned scholars, sniffing over slate and page 
like rabbits engaged upon green food, gave way to the 
sound of water and the vigour of scrubbing-brushes sym j 
bolic of the charwoman, who, wrapped in a large black 
shawl that her wrinkled arms wound round about her 
from within, and treading painfully on feet that years of 
imprudent intimacy with damp floorboards and wash¬ 
house flagstones had made into repositories of rheuma¬ 
tism and barometric pains, came each Saturday to scrub 
the schoolroom floor and discharge those coarser duties 
to which Mrs. Holmroyd’s respectability had not yet 
bowed. Once in each fortnight too, she came to under¬ 
take the heavier washing, bearing underneath her shawl 
a pair of ancient pattens, w r ith which Oswald and Beryl 
indulged in glorious foretastes of their own growth dur¬ 
ing the dinner hour. At eight o’clock, or earlier, a 
muffled wrap bestowed upon the street door by the 
washerwoman’s knuckles through their folds of shawl, 
announced her advent. Respectfully the street door 
opened. A voice affirmed: “It’s only Me’m!” And 
feet were heard, most punctiliously, to brush themselves 
upon the mat. 

This knock, and voice, and these feet, were Elizabeth. 


THE COUNCILLOR 


179 


Her hair when she removed her faded bonnet of an¬ 
tiquity, was silvery white. Her eyes were drawn, and 
the flesh falling away from them hung below each iris in 
crescents of red. But the face was not withered, and 
to those old enough to be conversant with the processes 
of age its features showed clear traces of earlier beauty. 
The speaking voice that issued from the sunken lips was 
singularly gentle and lent to her soft enunciation of the 
word “mum” a quality not servile. Seldom did Mrs. 
Holmroyd note the white head bent above her floor but 
that conscience smote her for being the instigator of its 
task. These silver hairs shone like prophetic texts to 
her, which with many an inward tremour she applied to 
her own life, asking: “How will it be with me, when some¬ 
day my forces fail?” For she saw that the world de¬ 
mands, with stern injustice, the hardest labour from the 
least fitted. The aged and the weak, descending through 
the successive strata of more tolerable occupations 
reserved for the strong and able, sink inevitably at last 
to those uttermost depths of toil that only age and feeble¬ 
ness could stoop to undertake. Elizabeth had no vices 
save a jug of ale for her midday meal (that she fetched 
at the required moment from an adjacent hostel beneath 
the all-sufficing shawl) and an intemperate thirst for 
work. Two husbands had she buried in her time; each, 
in turn, a helpless burden on her, and each as inconsolably 
lamented as if all virtue had died with him. Now, in her 
declining strength, the only favour she asked of the world 
was liberty to earn her bread. The only fear she had, 
was not of work but that the world should disbelieve the 
working capabilities of white hairs. More than anything 
she dreaded this aspersion on her strength, and there was 
something tragic in the physical efforts her frail form 
put forth to demonstrate its fitness for toil. She prayed 
to die as she had lived; a worker. And yet, for all her 


180 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


protestations of strength and her display of a spirit that 
seemed immortal, there were signs that the flesh began to 
fail. Her eyes lacked their ancient sharpness for spying 
cobwebs or penetrating corners. Her vaunted scrubbing- 
hand, for all its vigour, suffered lapses and betrayed the 
conscience it sought to serve, leaving inexplicable spots 
uncleansed, that Mrs. Holmroyd’s self by stealth removed. 

For years she had charred in Daneborough’s selectest 
circles, passing from one domestic cataclysm to another 
with faith and enthusiasm unimpaired; perpetually toil¬ 
ing on the dusty underside of the seamy canvas of life, 
and so perverted by long habit that she had come to regard 
blue mottled soap and pancheons for flesh-shrivelling water 
as the insignia of some holy faith. Scarcely a kitchen of 
Daneborough but she was acquainted with; scarcely a 
family but she had worked for. She knew 7 to its deeps 
the domestic economy of some scores of pretentious houses, 
and those dread domestic secrets that society spends its 
life in trying to conceal. The turned carpet, the patched 
stair, the worn blanket, the frayed curtains, the niggard 
larder—she knew which households suffered from these 
secret maladies, and could lay her unhesitating hand 
upon the cupboards in which their skeletons were kept. 
Among other members of the Corporation she had charred, 
at one time, for the late lamented Alderman Bankett, 
until his relict—knowing by personal experience the dis¬ 
abilities of old age, and suspecting that Elizabeth could 
not, for all her protestations, remain much longer exempt 
from them—mercifully discharged the charwoman’s white 
hairs from work so much beyond their strength. And 
Elizabeth had charred for the late Mrs. Burford and her 
daughter, too, until—in a moment of unpardonable weak¬ 
ness—her pride could not deny itself the gratification of 
imparting that, in her younger and more comely days, 
she had been sought in marriage by the Councillor’s pro- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


181 


genitor, and that had he but pressed his suit a little longer 
Miss Burford might have acknowledged Elizabeth for 
grandmother. The statement, being indisputably true, 
served naturally as a paralyzer of relations. “From that 
time’m,” Elizabeth confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, “it was 
no use me trying to suit her. I could read it in her face. 
She never rested while she got shut of me.” 

With which the face of the enthusiast, rent with a hun¬ 
dred seams and convulsed beyond recognition, would be 
flung into her apron—that shook hugely and horribly 
with silent sobs. On Oswald this dramatic scene, not in¬ 
frequently enacted, had a marrow-curdling effect very 
disturbing to the lower jaw and rendering deglutition dif¬ 
ficult. What stirred him most of all in this recital was 
the prepotent fact that the extinct founder of the Bur- 
ford fortunes had begun life with a handbell and muffin 
basket. Baskets, in fact, seemed to lend foundation to 
more than half the fortunes of the families of Dane- 
borough. With such examples to inspire him, what was 
there (aided by the sausage basket) himself might not 
achieve ? 

“It’s true’m!” Elizabeth was wont to assure his mother, 
fearful lest so wonderful a story might defraud her of 
the credit and the sympathy that were her due. “It’s as 
true as I’m stood here. He asked me three times. He 
asked me last time at the corner of Cattle Market. He 
had basket on his arm and bell in his hand, and he puts 
basket down as it might be there, and when I shakes my 
head he picks basket up again in a temper and rung bell 
fit to break it. But would I have him? Not me’m! 
Not likely. I wouldn’t have given up my two husbands 
for such a one as him. Not if you’d paid me.” 

And though Elizabeth might wrap tumultuous sobs in 
her tormented apron to think how harshly she had been 
used by this granddaughter-in-hypothesis, it must at least 


182 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


be admitted that such a relationship, unsupported by 
anything in the table of affinities, was one that exacted a 
niceness of handling beyond the competence of most hu¬ 
man nature to bestow upon it. Perhaps in acting as she 
did, Miss Burford took the only human course; for if 
the enthusiast had so far lost sight of the virtue of dis¬ 
cretion as to impart such a confidence to Councillor Bur- 
ford’s daughter, was she likely to be less communicative 
to servant-maids, whose obedient respect was hard enough 
to claim already? 

“I know what it is’m!” the enthusiast averred, with¬ 
drawing a withered, shaking hand from out of the folds 
of her shawl, her lips writhing one above the other in their 
efforts to retain composure and repress the rising sob. 
“She’s done with me. She’s finished with me. She’ll 
never let me work for her again. And I shan’t go and 
ask her’m. I shan’t beg. I’d die sooner.” 

“O, surely, surely!” Mrs. Holmroyd said, seeking to 
pour the vials of hope and comfort on the stricken 
woman, “it is not so bad as that, Elizabeth. There must 
be some mistake. You should not look on the dark side 
of things.” 

“She promised to let me know’m,” the shaking shawl 
replied. “I know what that means. I know what it 
means to be let know. That’s what they all say when 
they want to get shut of me. Everybody’s getting shut 
of me.” Her reddening eyes swam down to the responsive 
shawl. “. . . You'll be getting shut of me next’m.” 

And the dreadfullest part about it was that beneath 
this fleshless, bloodless sentiment, Mrs. Holmroyd descried 
the outline of the bony skeleton of truth. Yet the preca¬ 
riousness of her own existence, that should have taught 
her wisdom, taught her to be merciful instead. Without 
mercy, indeed, how could she dare to hope? The eye of 
her apprehension perceived Elizabeth as a terrible ex- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


183 


tension of her own self, displaying in most poignant form 
the tragedy of her own desires and fears. Never should 
this door be closed against her so long as her failing limbs 
and lurid fervour had strength to reach it. Oswald and 
Beryl she imbued with an ultra reverence for these silver 
hairs that some dread day (who knows?) might be her 
very own. Always they addressed the folded shawl and 
faded bonnet as Mrs. Betson, and asked her scrupulously 
how she did, and were so deferent and well behaved that 
now and again the ancient charwoman could not swallow 
her meat for the lump in her throat, and set down her 
midday beer untasted on the table, overcome with mo¬ 
mentary gratitude for the kindness this household showed 
her, and begging Mrs. Holmroyd: 

“O, mum! Don’t get shut of me for Childer’s sake, 
I’d sooner be let know by any place but this.” 

6 

Of all days in the week the one that Oswald and his 
sister loved the best was Saturday. Sunday dwelt a day 
apart, rather to be respected than beloved; unreckoned 
with the other friendly human days on which mankind has 
freedom to enjoy itself. If rain must fall on any day, by 
all means let it be a Sunday; piety being independent of 
the weather, and Sunday bringing with it no market 
penny as Saturday did. For Saturday was market day, 
and whilst the aged enthusiast charged herself with 
responsibility for their home, Oswald and his sister went 
a marketing with their mother, one on each side of her; 
Beryl on the inner side of safety, Oswald on the outer and 
protective flank, preserving as a gentleman should the 
guardian place each time they crossed from one cause¬ 
way to another by a manoeuvre almost military in its 
precision. They did not wear their Sunday best, but a 


184 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


modification sufficient to mark the status of the day, for 
the cream of Daneborough’s housewifery would be abroad 
with purses, grocery books and satchels, and Mrs. Holm- 
royd looked forward as much to the taste of public pride 
in her two children as the enthusiast looked forward to 
her midday ale. Each glance of praise bestowed on Os¬ 
wald or on Beryl went straight into her heart, like the 
amber beverage into the enthusiast’s stomach, warming it 
and filling the recipient with comfortable thoughts of 
God. She gave Him thanks to find no children in all the 
town looking nicer than her own. Often when they were 
thus out together, she would seek occasion to let them 
walk in front of her that she might indulge motherhood 
to the full sight of them, and let her eye feast on this 
treasure that belonged to her. 

For this forenoon shopping furnished but a further in¬ 
stance of her pride. Indeed, the next-door neighbour 
openly rebuked the prodigality that chose to purchase 
at a time when all the proudest purses in Daneborough 
were on parade, and said: “You’re very foolish, marm, 
excuse me!” It was the next-door’s wiser way to fare 
forth late at night, when Mrs. Holmroyd’s children lay 
abed, taking with her a carpet bag as if departing on a 
visit to the sea-side. With this she attacked the market 
at an hour when its powers of resistance began to flag; 
when the flaring lamps of paraffin began to spit and falter, 
and the fishmongers, hoarse with a whole day’s crying of 
“Now you fish buyers!” had ceased to fling pump water 
over their weeping stalls, or with watering-cans to try 
and coax the gaping cod and halibut back to life under 
the delusion that they were in their native element once 
more. Instead, they now displayed alacrity to thrust 
their flaccid remnants into any hesitating bass that 
paused before them, or into the market perambulator that 
passed by, charged with green vegetables and sleeping 


THE COUNCILLOR 


185 


childhood, crying: “Here you are, missus! It’s been 
waiting for you. Fresh from the sea. You needn’t go 
any further for a bit of prime halibut.” 

And the butchers too, in smocks that had been snowy 
white this morning, but were daubed all over now with 
the bloody finger-smears betokening a busy day, would be 
similarly reckless in their disposal of last legs and beasts’ 
internals, before the market closed. Sometimes, ap¬ 
proaching midnight, if the application of an eye to Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s letter-box revealed the glitter of an inward 
light, the next-door neighbour would administer a muffled 
summons, on fire to claim the triumph of some dubitable 
purchase at a price that should have stirred all righteous 
ears to envy. 

“There marm ! And there! What do you say to that! 
And look you here! Is that a piece of good fresh meat? 
Smell it marm. As fresh as when it was killed. What 
do you think I paid? You’ll never guess.” And Mrs. 
Holmroyd never guessed. She never even learned the 
first rudiments of the lesson that the next-door neigh¬ 
bour’s rhapsodies essayed to teach her. 

“You ought to come out marketing with me, marm!” 
the next-door neighbour urged, filled in this hour of con¬ 
quest with the proselytizer’s zeal. “I’d learn you how 
to go about things. You’d soon pick it up. Pork, too, 
marm. You’d buy it for half the price you pay at Wax- 
ford’s if only you’d go at a proper time.” 

It was the next-door neighbour’s pride, this nocturnal 
marketing. She gloried in it. To feed on meat at pence 
per pound cheaper than the folly of the morning buyers 
paid for it brought her more joy than a noble deed does 
to the virtuous. Nor could she comprehend the curious 
obstinacy of her neighbour, who, for all that Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd seemed to share her triumph and applaud her wis¬ 
dom, yet pursued each Saturday the trodden path of er- 


186 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ror; going out in the forenoon with her children to buy 
her Sunday’s dinner from the High Gate butcher, and 
her fish from the High Gate fishmonger, and her vege¬ 
tables from the High Gate greengrocer, all of whom, in 
the next-door neighbour’s parlance: “makes you pay for 
the gold lettering on their window, marm.” And it was 
useless that Mrs. Holmroyd sought to let her heart be¬ 
lieve she did these things, in some sort, for her children’s 
sake. She did them, as the next-door neighbour vexedly 
divined, for pride. Perhaps, in this, she was not totally 
to blame. A culpable providence had scarcely helped her 
to be humble^ 

For when she came to Daneborough, she had, all told, 
no more than thirty pounds, and of this sum the greater 
part transformed itself into the Spring Bank home. But 
Providence, like an irritable teacher, alternately too leni¬ 
ent and too firm, and so spoiling the character committed 
to its care, inspired (in Mrs. Holmroyd’s favour) a frail 
annuitant to die. This was a maternal great-aunt whose 
death advantaged Oswald’s mother by the fabulous sum 
of eighty pounds, some shillings, and those odd pence in 
which lawyers and business men of principle delight to 
prove integrity. The reversion of this pittance that 
came to Mrs. Holmroyd not a day too soon—for already 
the quarter’s rent was due—sufficed to set the beneficiary’s 
fears at rest, restore her faith in heaven and place Aunt 
Caroline among the saints. 

In due course, the financial remains of Aunt Caroline 
were committed to the bank. They were interred in the 
Banker’s Vault as eighty pounds, some shillings and the 
scrupulous odd pence. But the deposit note that Mrs. 
Holmroyd brought away as her certificate of burial was 
but for seventy pounds. Already the awful process of 
decomposition was set in. Before long, the mourner 
stood by the side of Aunt Caroline’s mortal resting place 


THE COUNCILLOR 


187 


once more, and the Deposit Note when she retired said 
sixty-five. Now the wretched mourner began to see the 
true significance of death and to wish Aunt Caroline were 
still alive. 

For the knowledge of this money at the bank had 
wrought in her a curious moral harm. It bred in her 
the feeling that her present life was specious and deceit¬ 
ful, as if she were living it by too mean a standard below 
the level of necessity. When she baked her pies or took 
the money for the little school, the memory of this hidden 
store rebuked her. It encouraged her to entertain a false 
ideal of independence. What were a few pennies paid 
for better meat, measured against such a background at 
the Bank? How could she deny her children milk and 
butter of the best or shame them by unneedful shabbiness 
when this sponsive sum protested? It lent a countenance 
to all her native generosities, to all those beautiful im¬ 
pulses of love and kindness that overgrew transplanted 
prudence like rank and native weeds. She was, all else 
before, a woman and a mother. Of business she knew 
nothing. Least of all could she comprehend that im¬ 
placable form of business imposing the stern denial of 
every better impulse. Perplexedly endeavouring to be 
practical, she clung to the creed of her heart’s childhood: 
that kindness is a sort of providential currency, purchas¬ 
ing what it gives; that the eternal Banker never dis¬ 
honours one promissary note of love, that the bread cast 
fearlessly upon the waters will come back, as it is written, 
after many days. 

7 

Councillor Burford’s shop stood in the High Gate al¬ 
most opposite to the Bank so familiar to Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
fears, and but a stone’s throw from the Mansion House, 


188 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of whose severe detachment and superiority it seemed 
to have borrowed not a little. Two bayed and conse¬ 
quential windows, each endowed with the abdominous con¬ 
vexity of an alderman, imposed their corpulence upon the 
pavement, and, scorning the meretricious finery of modern 
trade, attested a sober, well-established business. Noth¬ 
ing in the shop’s external features had been changed 
since the death of the first Burford, who might have risen 
from his cubicle in the cemetery and walked to his ancient 
place of business in the High Gate without suspecting 
that twenty years rather than one night had passed since 
last he hung his hat behind the counter and tied the 
strings of his apron into a concise bow across the pit of 
his stomach. This resistance of the shop to popular en¬ 
croachment formed no small part of its proprietor’s 
pride. Just as the next door neighbour vaunted her noc¬ 
turnal marketing, and Mrs. Holmroyd drew satisfaction 
from purchases made by day, so the Councillor reposed 
pride in his unaltered windows transected into a multitude 
of panes that spoke their owner’s long descent and at¬ 
tested an unbroken business lineage of fifty years. For 
the ostentatious nakedness of plate-glass that defiled so 
many frontages competing with his own he had no more 
tolerance than for a woman indecorously underclad, whose 
immodesty displayed more breast than bodice. The vul¬ 
gar tendencies of contemporary trade, flaunting its wares 
without reserve before the eyes of all and sundry in a 
shameless effort to seduce inconstant custom and tempt 
those feeble-minded purchasers whose judgment fell be¬ 
fore profusion, he steadfastly opposed. Business was no 
affair of trumpery window-dressing and unblushing price- 
tickets that ogled every passer-by. These things prosti¬ 
tuted it. Quality did not lift its skirt in public places 
and show ankles of seductive cheapness to lure debased 
admirers. Quality, like a prudent woman, stayed in- 


THE COUNCILLOR 


189 


doors, displaying herself alone to those imbued with her 
own virtue that sought her there. The soul of business, 
in the Councillor’s conception, dwelt not in conflict but 
in character. Its foundations were personality. Cus¬ 
tomers had recourse to him as clients interviewed a 
doctor; seeking qualities and prices from the lips of his 
experience, and accepting the value of his judgment in all 
the things he dealt in, before their own. The big bowed 
windows, that might have been loquacious with labels, 
preserved instead the grave discretion of a surgery; such 
goods as they acknowledged were communicated soberly 
to the world without other recommendation than them¬ 
selves. Yet in case these sober utterances might fail to 
make impression on the thoughtless, above the door—in 
characters for all to read—was gilded the date of the 
shop’s establishment, proclaiming without a doubt that 
here was no mere upstart trade. 

But though the Councillor’s pride took stand unyield¬ 
ing before this frontage, and he said “It shan’t be done 
no different whilst I’m alive,” by which he made allusion 
to his son, who had betrayed at one time, tepid indications 
of a leaning towards plate glass, his pride (on the other 
hand) swelled with the consciousness of those internal 
modifications that bespoke the business’s expansion. The 
living room behind the shop wherein the Burford family 
ate their dinner when the Councillor was a boy and the 
Councillor’s father carving the midday meal could keep 
an eye upon the counter through a sort of retail hagio¬ 
scope or one-pane window, prepared to wipe the gravy 
from his mouth at any moment on the appearance of a 
customer and pass into the shop, still masticating with 
a certain grandeur as he served,—all this was swept away, 
and but a transverse girder demarked the line once drawn 
between domesticity and trade. 

Elizabeth remembered well these early premises and 


190 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


had often been served across the counter by the one¬ 
time aspirant for her hand, whose passion, constrained 
by marriage and the declining fortune of the once-desired, 
lost itself at last like an indistinguishable tributary in the 
broad delta of business dealing. His eye towards the 
end, could rest upon the faded object of his earlier adora¬ 
tion with the dilute politeness for a casual customer, tak¬ 
ing her coppers and talking of the weather visible beyond 
his windows as though no other topic had ever come be¬ 
tween them, whatever his inner thoughts might be. Thus 
it fares with all romance, that is either slain or outlives 
itself. And there is no more painful spectacle than a 
superannuated passion propped on reality and crippled 
with the rheumatism of disillusionment. Yet when the 
founder of the Burford business died, Elizabeth craved 
respite from her day’s employment to see his body taken 
back to earth, standing by the cemetery gates whilst tears 
more frequent than the minute bell dropped on her faded 
shawl. Hers was the last eye, indeed, to look upon the 
coffin before the clods obscured it. 

God bless us, what have we here but pride again? 
What took her to the cemetery but her pride, agreeably 
garbed in weeds of sentiment, “to see the last of him” 
and replenish its meagre store with the memory that this 
occupant of a polished coffin had more than once besought 
her wrinkled hand, and that had but her hand been less 
exclusive she might have wept beneath a widow’s veil and 
gone home in a pair-coach to spill tears over funeral 
biscuits instead of trudging on tired feet to the wash-tub? 

Her loyalty towards the dead man took the form of a 
pious doubt of his son’s ability to succeed him. “He’ll 
never be his father,” was her expressed opinion. “He’s 
nothing of his father in him.” And at that time, per¬ 
haps, there seemed some ground for the prediction. 
“The Shop,” old Joseph Burford might have affirmed in 


THE COUNCILLOR 


191 


the historic language of a deceased monarch, “c’est moi.” 
He had made it. He was it. All the majesty of the 
business seemed incorporate in his own person. When he 
quitted the counter to take his meals the shop assumed an 
empty and uncertain air, like a face with its mouth open. 
The younger Burford seemed no substitute for the elder, 
whose delegated authority he wielded with such diffidence 
as to deprive the instrument of its function. It was too 
obvious that he shone by reflected light, deriving the 
greater part of lustre from his father’s eye, whose bright¬ 
ness also extinguished him. Even in the weighing of a 
pound of tea or the rashering of bacon, the paternal 
optic hovered hawklike over his uncertainty, ready to 
pounce upon a fault. The younger Burford expressed 
a cypher in the shop. Customers of standing asked the 
elder Burford how he did, and asked the younger Burford 
(in the elder’s absence) how his father did. They never 
asked the younger Burford how the younger did, for 
there seemed as yet nothing sufficiently established about 
his identity to justify solicitude. 

But with his father’s death a noticeable change was 
wrought in him. He assumed his father’s gold watch; his 
father’s apron; his father’s trenchant tones and author¬ 
itative eye. The transition was rapid. From the mo¬ 
ment that he became the accredited recipient of con¬ 
dolences on his father’s death, making subdued but suit¬ 
able acknowledgment; imparting to customers the cir¬ 
cumstances of his father’s illness and latest hours; his 
age, and the length of time he had been established in busi¬ 
ness—which, he took the opportunity to assure them 
gravely, would “be carried on as usual, with the same re¬ 
gard to quality”—the younger Burford disappeared. It 
seemed almost as if the son were buried, rather than the 
father. When customers enquired for “Mr. Burford” it 
was the son who looked up from his counter with acknowl- 


192 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


edgment of the name. His figure, gradually expanding, 
absorbed and incorporated the business as his father’s had 
done before. When he was out of it the shop seemed 
empty. From his presence teas and coffees drew such 
authenticity as they had; hams lacked all virtue unless he 
handled them; customers lent no confidence to bacon until 
the Burford hands had laid their blessing on it, with the 
unction of a bishop. The mechanical laudations of his 
hirelings behind the counter fell flat and lukewarm by 
comparison with the master’s manner. When they dis¬ 
played a piece of “rolled” or “smoked” their tepid com¬ 
mendations seemed to diffuse dubiety on both sides of the 
counter. “Thank you . . . but I’ll wait for Mr. Bur- 
ford. Mr. Burford knows exactly what I want,” was 
a frequent formula. The assistants were resigned to it. 
They even seemed to await it and welcome it when it came, 
as a merciful solution of their difficulties; thankful to lay 
the merchandise down and escape the responsibility im¬ 
posed by it. Not infrequently they prompted customers 
whose hesitation increased their own: “Perhaps you’d 
like to see Mr. Burford. He’ll be at liberty in a mo¬ 
ment . . .” and looked unfeignedly grateful when the 
recommendation was accepted. 

Thus the second Burford came in time to be the 
repository of hundreds of domestic tastes and idio- 
syncracies, as a lawyer comes to know the secrets of his 
clients. He knew whose palate exacted fat bacon, and 
whose streaked; who favoured chicory; whose taste in 
teas inclined to China or Ceylon; what cheeses, and the 
state of their maturity, respective customers demanded, 
with a wide discrimination in tinned merchandise, jams, 
biscuits and dried fruits. Long before the elder Bur- 
ford’s death he had taken unto himself a wife and become 
the father of a son and daughter. His wife’s death in 
some sort paved the way to a municipal career, which he 


THE COUNCILLOR 


193 


appeared to choose as an alternative to re-marriage. 
Certainly he could have espoused no second wife more 
fitted to consolidate his business. The smallest article he 
sold seemed stamped with the integrity of the Council 
Chamber. To be served by a full-blooded Councillor, and 
ma’amed augustly by a City Father is not displeasing to 
the populace. For the expenditure of a trifle it might 
feel itself in contact with the Mansion House and enjoy 
a brief intimacy with the power that imposed the rates. 
Elizabeth’s prediction was disproved. Old Joseph Bur- 
ford’s son had over-stepped his father. Some day the 
Parish Church bells would peal and he would walk behind 
the mace, no longer Mr. Councillor, but Mr. Mayor. 

8 

The shop was familiar enough to Mrs. Holmroyd. 
Scarce a Saturday but she had passed its windows and 
bestowed a glance upon the merchandise displayed behind 
its many panes. She had never shopped there, however, 
and the consciousness of this, added to the consciousness 
that her visit was expected, seemed to imbue this errand 
with something of formality. A slight, but perceptible, 
feeling of nervousness crept over her as she opened the 
old-fashioned door, glazed and checkered like the windows 
on each side of it, and led her family across the threshold. 
In the earlier days of the Councillor’s father a dribbling 
bell on a loose neck would have announced her entry with 
insensate laughter. Before his death this obsolescent 
sentinel of custom had already given way to a spring 
gong. But even though the spring gong struck but once, 
that once (with the growth of custom) became so con¬ 
tinuous and distracting that it was dispensed with, like its 
predecessor. Now only the door interposed between the 
counter and the outer world, but the present proprietor 


194 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


clung tenaciously to this as to a last tradition of self- 
respecting trade, and stubbornly opposed the growing 
fashion of the open frontage that made a place of business 
as common as the street, and gave admission to dogs 
with no manners to speak of, and the undesired. 

Already the two counters coped busily with their 
Saturday morning’s trade, and the half dozen high, un¬ 
comfortable chairs were occupied by parcels, sitters, or 
umbrellas. 

Councillor Burford occupied the place of honour be¬ 
hind the first counter on the right hand side of the door, 
over which he presided in solitary state, merely snapping 
his fingers for assistance when he needed it. With his 
Saturday’s white apron tied round his ample midway, 
and wearing his Saturday’s white shirt, its sleeves rolled 
up above the elbows, and the V-shaped opening in his 
waistcoat cut deep enough to let two studs be seen, he 
displayed a strong resemblance to his late father. Upon 
his nose at its lowermost extremity sat a gold pince- 
nez, whose function at first sight seemed scarcely ap¬ 
parent inasmuch as its lenses oscillated a couple of inches 
below his eyes, and he appeared to look at everything 
and everybody above them. These glasses were a phase 
of Councillor Burford with which Mrs. Holmroyd and her 
family had not yet made acquaintance, but they were 
well known to all frequenters of the shop and members 
of the Council Chamber. Now and again he lifted them 
from his nose, which they straddled precariously like an 
indifferent rider on a steed too big for him, and raised 
them with a gesture of deliberation as though, once these 
hindrances to sight had been removed, his unobstructed 
judgment could clearly see. Judgment thus afforded the 
sight it looked for, he replaced them on the extremity 
of his nose, where a visible groove on each side of it was 
by long usage fretted for their reception. But lengthy 


THE COUNCILLOR 


195 


deliberation seemed not a pronounced characteristic of 
the Councillor, whose decisions appeared to need no dis¬ 
tant seeking, but were all ready for immediate delivery 
like the goods he sold, and required only to be served out. 
At the time of Mrs. Holmroyd’s entrance he was engaged 
in conversation with the wife of the Hill Street Doctor 
whose son sang in St. Saviour’s choir. A biscuit canister 
stood upon the counter, on which his bared forearm rested 
with an air of confidence. 

For one thing Councillor Burford never was. He 
never was servile. He was none of your bowers and 
scrapers, your handwashers and wringers of aprons. His 
politeness bore ever a certain air of brusquerie; his brus- 
querie a certain character of politeness. The two qual¬ 
ities were inseparable in him. He addressed his customers 
with a voice only less peremptory than that in which he 
spoke to his assistants. It was rare that he lowered 
it. His phrases, terse and trenchant for the most part, 
were sliced with the blade of sharp decision and served in 
such a way as he would stab the knife into a slab of 
butter and offer its point to some hesitating patron with 
a curt: “Try it yourself, ma’am.” And his ma’ams 
made no invidious distinctions. He never shirked them 
even to aprons and shawls, nor by slurring sought to dis¬ 
own their utterance. On the contrary, when Councillor 
Burford said “Ma’am” the word cut through the shop 
and had a curious effect of emphasizing the utterer’s own 
importance rather than acknowledging hers to whom it 
was addressed. His “ma’ams” implicated nothing per¬ 
sonal; they subscribed simply to a convention and com¬ 
promised his own respect no more than the “dearly be¬ 
loved brethren” of the pulpit commits the preacher to love 
his fellow men. 

Behind the counter on the opposite side of the shop 
facing his father, the younger Burford served, and as- 


196 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


sisted reminiscent history to repeat herself. Here, save 
for a little march in time and some internal change, all 
was as it had been in the ancient Burford days. Dig¬ 
nity and self-importance turned automatically to the 
right; modesty and vacillation, after a spasmodic mo¬ 
ment, shrunk to the left, or hung irresolutely on their 
heel before the communicating counter served by mere 
assistants, who took the dregs of custom, packed up con¬ 
solidated groceries, and hurried to their master’s elbow at 
the cracking of his thumb and finger. It was instructive 
to note how completely the Councillor’s personality per¬ 
meated his shop; how it controlled and actuated the move¬ 
ments of his helpers, as if they had been prolongations 
of his own limbs rather than independent human beings. 
Despite his thirty years the younger Burford had been 
trained in such subjection to the elder’s word, referring 
every doubt to the paternal certitude, that within the 
precincts of the shop he seemed to doff all individuality 
with his coat and hung his judgment meekly on his father’s 
nod, just as he committed his coat to the hook behind 
the private office door. Merchandise confided surrepti¬ 
tiously to his inspection from time to time by doubting 
assistants was not less dubiously eyed by him, and, after 
mysterious whisperings behind a hand, taken up to the 
high altar to be passed or vetoed by a terse pronounce¬ 
ment on the Master’s part. 

The junior Burford had just been up to the chief 
counter to collect authority for the disposal of a box 
of fairy candles when Mrs. Holmroyd entered the shop. 
Noting this unfamiliar presence he accosted her politely 
on his way back to the subordinate counter with the en¬ 
quiry: “Are you being attended to, Madam?” His 
voice, though aspiring to a higher plane of culture than 
his father’s, lacked the parental ring. It had no timbre 
of self-confidence, and its politeness was plainly but a 


THE COUNCILLOR 197 

servile substitute for personality—to which he would not 
dare to aspire during his father’s life. He used the un¬ 
abbreviated “Madam” with an air of such repression as 
made the two syllables sound feeble by contrast with his 
father’s one. Mrs. Holmroyd was on the point of mak¬ 
ing answer to the younger Burford—“Mr. Arry,” as he 
was designated in the shop—when the Councillor, still re¬ 
posing his sleeveless forearm over the biscuit canister, 
raised his voice out of the general level of his conversa¬ 
tion with the doctor’s wife to say: “I’m attending to 
Mrs. Holmroyd myself in a moment.” The announce¬ 
ment appeared to catch the younger Burford in the back. 
With a hurried murmur of apology he quitted Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd and obliterated himself behind his counter. After 
a few brief moments the doctor’s wife departed, bestow¬ 
ing an intent regard on Mrs. Holmroyd and her children, 
that seemed to ask of memory if these were patients of 
her husband or not. Oswald plucked his mother’s sleeve 
and drew her ear towards his lips that h<* might whisper 
who this rustling lady was who passed them in a waft 
of petticoats and scent. Already the Councillor, push¬ 
ing the biscuit tin dismissively aside with the utterance 
of a name that caused it to be run for by a white apron 
and borne away across the shop, invited Mrs. Holmroyd: 
“Now ma’am!” 

He stood awaiting her, all business; overlooking his 
precarious glasses that shook to the least word or ges¬ 
ture; his pencil and duplex entry-book in hand. Mrs. 
Holmroyd advanced to the counter, her children follow¬ 
ing, and unwound the little paper scroll enumerating their 
week’s supplies. The list was not a long one. It struck 
her painfully, in fact, as being too curt and unimportant 
for the impressive attention bestowed upon it. Its end 
came with startling abruptness, particularly as the pencil 
had taken up an expectant posture on a fresh line, and 


198 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the Councillor’s voice demanded: “And the next, ma’am.” 
There was no next. She murmured her regret, with a 
gentle air of cogitation that seemed to seek requirements 
overlooked. The Councillor, still holding the pencil to 
his note-book, peered over his gold-rimmed pince-nez into 
space, as if lending his own more active and qualified mind 
for the assistance of her introspection and prompted 
memory with such articles as his wide experience taught 
him a housewife might be likely to require. 

“Soap, ma’am? No soap. Candles? No candles. 
Dried fruit? No dried fruit. Currants? Raisins? 
Sultanas ?” 

All these, he gave assurance were of the very best. 
Her conscience smote her in the end to let so many best 
of things go by, as though she were insensible to quality; 
and feeling at length that some more suitable acknowl¬ 
edgment of the Councillor’s trouble on her behalf was 
called for than unvarying negation, she let a wavering 
choice be seen at the suggestion of a cream-cheese. 

“Fresh in from the country this morning, ma’am!” the 
Councillor affirmed. “The very best. You won’t be dis¬ 
appointed. I can recommend them.” His thumb and 
finger snapped like the hammer of a pistol. “Fletcher! 
—Two cream cheeses for this lady to look at. Large 
and small. Sharp.” 

One of the white aprons thus apostrophized, pushed an¬ 
other obstructive apron flat against the wall and bore the 
ordered cheeses to the head counter, each outspread upon 
a hand. The Councillor, slipping his pencil behind an 
ear, turned up the green rush wrapping with fingers of 
expressive admiration, and displayed the delectable tex¬ 
ture of cool cream to Mrs. Holmroyd’s gaze with a ges¬ 
ture so convincing that refusal was unthinkable. She 
thanked him. They looked lovely. She would take one. 

“A large one, ma’am?” 


THE COUNCILLOR 


199 


In the matter of pork pies the Councillor had betrayed 
no hesitation. He had said, as Mrs. Holmroyd’s recol¬ 
lection quickly prompted her “Let’s begin with a small 
one.” But in respect of cheeses he posed the question 
with the larger in his hand, as if her answer were assured, 
and she chose “the large one, please.” It seemed that 
all the practical lessons learned from Councillor Burford 
counted for nothing when she tried to put them into prac¬ 
tice against their master. 

His busy pencil added up the items of her bill. “Six¬ 
teen and ninepence, ma’am.” She laid down a sovereign, 
that left her softly as if it had been a sigh. He rang 
it on the counter, caught it dexterously again and rapped 
it smartly into the till. “Sixteen and nine, and three’s 
seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Nineteen and six. And 
six’s Twenty. Thank you, ma’am. Rather better 
weather again this morning. The things shall be sent 
on to you at once. Boy!” 

Up to this moment the Councillor had gazed at Mrs, 
Holmroyd’s two children with an eye so distant and re- 
jective that, for all the recognition it paid them, they 
might have been at home. But as their mother turned 
to go, he raised the wagging pince-nez from his nose, 
and extending it indicatively across the counter in their 
direction, asked: “Do you young people know the way 
to eat sweets?” 

The young people, awed by the sudden application of 
that smileless eye, and embarrassed by turbulent desires, 
hung their heads w T ith one accord. Oswald contributed 
a whispered “thank you.” 

The Councillor prized the stopper of a big glass bot¬ 
tle, loosened the stubborn contents with the point of a 
great knife, and thrust his hand within the flask as far 
as the swelling forearm flesh would let him, with a great 
action of liberality—as if there were no limit to what 


200 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


generosity desired to bring forth. Once or twice, in the 
endeavour to dislodge these refractory sweetmeats, he 
smote the bottle with a resounding flat hand and shook 
it forcefully. It was therefore not devoid of a sense of 
disappointment to Oswald and his sister that after such 
promising preliminaries no more than half a dozen sweet¬ 
meats rewarded the Councillor’s labours on their behalf. 
But he dispensed these across the counter, three into each 
politely upturned palm, with an air of condescension that 
restored magnificence to the offering, saying, as though 
to allay Mrs. Holmroyd’s unspoken fears: 

“These’ll do them no harm, ma’am. They’re genuine 
boiled sweets. You can’t beat ’em. All pure sugar. 
Fourpence ha’penny a pound. The very best.” 

She thanked the donor warmly and prompted her chil¬ 
dren, “What do you say to Mr. Burford?” They said 
“Thank you” in turn, still under the conflicting emotions 
stirred by the gift. 

“Good morning ma’am.—Now ma’am?” 

The second Ma’am was directed to Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
successor. No allusion had been made to the pork pie. 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s pride was glad of that, having been 
haunted by the fear that this subject might be raised in 
public to her discomfiture. She left the shop with a feel¬ 
ing of curious satisfaction for something accomplished; 
for some purpose—she knew not what—achieved. 

9 

Left to the milk pudding, hash and peeled potatoes 
in the kitchen; her pail, scrubbing brush and marbled 
soap in the schoolroom upstairs, the enthusiast had not 
passed the morning without incident. More than once, 
under stimulus of what she had to tell, she hurried to the 
front door, and screening her red eyelids with a steaming 


THE COUNCILLOR 


201 


hand against the sunlight that mixed imperfectly with the 
November air, she gazed long and earnestly down the 
street, as if, by the sheer intensity of her regard, she 
sought to bring her tardy mistress home. The moment 
Mrs. Holmroyd crossed the doorstep, Elizabeth appeared 
at the passage end; her arms and apron in such commotion 
as might have been occasioned by a high wind. 

“O’m! What do you think! You’ll never guess!” 

At first sight the emotions agitating the aged figure 
appeared to Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes so tragic that she had 
a momentary sinking of the heart. But Elizabeth’s 
countenance, shaking off the conflicting moods that mobbed 
it, emerged from the momentary tumult with such a 
look of triumph as gave her back half a score of her 
most active years. She seemed revitalized; her face 
shone with the high serenity of a saucepan lid. 

“Miss Burford’s been. I’m to go and char for her on 
Tuesday.” “O’m!” she exclaimed, discarding the im¬ 
pediment of her coarse apron and uplifting both hands 
to heaven. “I wish you could ’a seen her face when I 
opened door. You never saw anybody so took aback in 
all your born days’m. She hadn’t a word to say for 
herself. She went all colours. She could ’a dropped. 
She says, ‘Dear me! What! . . . Why, is that you 
Elizabeth?’ ‘Aye, it’s me’m,’ I tells her. ‘I thought 
you’d given up going out working,’ she says after a bit. 
‘I should ’a done,’ I says, ‘if some folks had had their 
way wi’ me’m. But I’ve a few friends left’m. I’ve never 
wanted a day’s work since you said you’d let me know.’ 
She coughs aside of her hand and says: ‘I’m glad to 
hear it, and to see you looking so well.’ ” 

“ . . . And then’m, she asks if you was in, and I tells 
her you wasn’t, and she says: ‘So you work for Mrs. 
Holmroyd, then?’ and I says: ‘I haven’t missed a Satur¬ 
day with her for many a week. And Monday’s once a 


202 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


fortnight, regular. 5 She says: ‘0’ and ‘Really 5 and ‘In¬ 
deed. 5 ‘What was I doing on Tuesday? 5 I tells her 
Nothing as I knew of 5 m, and she says: ‘Do you care to 
come and work for me? 5 ‘Not unless I 5 m wanted, 5 I 
answers. ‘I don’t care to go nowheres until I’m asked’m. 5 
O’m! It would ’a done you good to see look she gied me. 
I know her. I haven’t spring cleaned beside of her for 
nothing. She would ’a liked to toss her head up and 
walk away, but she swallows her pride and says: ‘There’s 
no question of you not being wanted. 5 

“Aye . . .” the enthusiast continued. “ . . . and I 
knew in a minute what was cause of her asking me. 
Servant’s left her. She’s all with herself. She wouldn’t 
’a had me back without she was forced. She hasn’t for- 
gotten’m. And she hasn’t forgiven. She didn’t say a 
word about it to me, and I didn’t to her, but it was in her 
eye all time.” 

The triumph consequent upon Miss Burford’s visit so 
thrilled and occupied Elizabeth that the primary object 
of her calling was quite lost sight of. Her reading of 
Miss Burford’s mind did credit to her eyesight. The dis¬ 
covery of this claimant to her grandfather’s misplaced 
fancy in Mrs. Holmroyd’s house was indeed a matter of 
unpalatable surprise to Councillor Burford’s daughter, 
who had derived deceptive security from the charwoman’s 
absence, deeming a danger lessened that is not seen. But 
here, to her mortification, she found the enemy entrenched 
in the least suspected place of all. For the safeguard 
of a grandeur that might otherwise foolishly compromise 
itself, she would have liked to know how much of the secret 
of the first Burford’s ridiculous attempts at misalliance 
had been imparted to this newcomer. Some knowledge of 
the situation was, in fact, essential to her future line of 
conduct with Mrs. Holmroyd. If the secret were in¬ 
violable (which she had too small a faith in the integrity 


THE COUNCILLOR 


203 


of her sex to suppose) dignity might assert itself; if be¬ 
trayed, then dignity would need to be diluted with a little 
diplomatic friendship. People who possess secrets to our 
disadvantage cannot be altogether treated as strangers. 

As for the real object of Miss Burford’s visit . . . 

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast exclaimed when Mrs. Holm- 
royd ventured to enquire concerning it at last, “ . . . I 
thought I’d told you. She came about the pie.” 

The pie? 

“She won’t be wanting it’m. Leastways, not this week. 
She said it was her father’s mistake. She’d told him, 
but men was all alike. She didn’t know what her father 
wanted to meddle with such things for. He’d nothing to 
do with it. She’ll take a small pie next week instead, if 
it’s all the same to you.” 

Next week. If it was all the same to her. 

The pie that was already made. The extra-large small 
pie for eighteen pence with which Mrs. Holmroyd had 
sought to propitiate this new customer and extend the 
boundaries of her hopes. The pie that had been her justi¬ 
fication for this visit to the Bank and to the Burford shop 
this morning. Oswald and Beryl, staggered by the tid¬ 
ings, yet knowing not what precise attitude to adopt in 
face of it, studied their mother’s countenance as if it were 
a sum. 

She was very dignified. She let no sign be seen. 
Drawing off her gloves with sweet serenity she thanked 
Elizabeth for delivering the message. “I am so glad Miss 
Burford called and that you are to work for her again. 

I always said it had been a mistake, Elizabeth.” 

But Miss Burford’s was not the only mind that the * 
new conjunction of relationships had troubled. Mrs. 
Holmroyd, too, saw elements in this re-shaping future to 
vex her peace. Not less than the hard-faced daughter 
of the Councillor had she a secret ambry of the soul to 


204 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


guard, hiding its bony relics from the eyes of men. And 
before the enthusiast took leave that night, though swathed 
already in the faded shawl and bowed to the attitude 
of humble resignation for the attended sacrament of sil¬ 
ver, Mrs. Holmroyd took advantage of the pious curtsey 
and murmuring lips of gratitude to breathe the name 
“Elizabeth!” with a lowered urgent voice. 

“Mum?” responded the enthusiast. 

“If you go to Miss Burford’s on Tuesday . . . you 
will be sure . . . not to say a Word.” 

“What about’m?” 

“About the . . . About the service you did for me the 
other week.” 

“Service?” enquired the enthusiast, perplexedly. “You 
don’t mean . . . cream jug’m?” 

“Hush, Elizabeth!” Mrs. Holmroyd turned an appre¬ 
hensive face towards the kitchen door, left partly open be¬ 
hind her. “It is strictly between ourselves.” 

“Lor’m!” the enthusiast consoled her, “I’d clean forgot 
while you reminded me. It’s not the first time I’ve 
fetched things back for people—yes, and put ’em in for 
them as well. I did it regular for Mrs. Coldthorpe, and 
never breathed a word to nobody. She could trust me’m. 
She’d no need to warn me. You’re the first that ever 
has.” 

More and more disquieted with the enthusiast’s evasion 
of her fears, Mrs. Holmroyd felt a dreadful apprehension 
seize her. 

“Elizabeth. . . . Have you broken your word to me! 
Have you told . . . anyone already?” 

To her dismay signs of agitation began to invest the 
shawl. It heaved convulsively. 

“I know what it is’m!” she heard a suffocated voice ex¬ 
claim. “You’re wanting an excuse to get rid of me. I’ve 
seen it coming on. You’ve never been same since you 


THE COUNCILLOR 


205 


called at Rockery House. She must ’a told you some¬ 
thing then. You’ve made it up betwixt you.” 

At which the shawl, overcome with its own emotion, 
danced grotesquely as if it blew, empty, on a clothes line; 
nor could it be prevailed upon to partake of comfort 
until the rejected pie was insinuated beneath its fringe, 
when the tears of reproach changed their grief to grati¬ 
tude, and the sobs became articulate enough to cry: 

“O! mum. You’re too good to me. I don’t deserve 
it. You’ve only got to say the Word and I won’t go 
there at all.” 


BOOK VI 


THE ORGANIST 

1 

C HRISTMAS, that arch old time-server, hiding 
his pagan principles beneath a Christian livery, 
lending self-indulgence an air of specious good¬ 
will, and proclaiming peace out of the satiety that suc¬ 
ceeds good appetite; Christmas, that benevolent impostor, 
came and went, bringing to humanity by way of gifts 
such things as it already had; merry-making to the 
merry-makers; riches to the rich; sorrow to the sorrow¬ 
ful; bronchitis to the bronchial; hunger to the hungry; 
death to the dying. The little school broke up with 
games and laughter. The wooden benches, scoured and 
scalded, were stacked upon the deal table. The sallow 
atlas, sponged tenderly with lukewarm water as if it had 
been a face, resigned itself to the tedium of Christmas 
with the air of a dyspeptic to whom all indiscretions of 
rejoicing are forbidden. From the schoolroom landing 
to the bottom stair the faded Brussels carpet was relaid 
in case Miss Burford or some other chanced to call. 

The cares of life, multiplied like flocks of hungry 
winter birds, thronged in the season’s wake. Coal grew 
profligate, burning away to nothing in no time like the 
best of resolutions. Gas so wasted his substance in riot¬ 
ous living that two of him were needed to make a light 
at all, whilst down in the cellar the insatiable meter 
ticked like an eight-day clock. Water froze and refused 
to be placated without a plumber. Pies and sausages 
were at a discount. Father Christmas, surfeited with 

206 


THE ORGANIST 


207 


geese and turkeys, positively sickened at the thought of 
pork. Scholastic bills would not be issued until the end 
of the holidays. It was uncertain when they would be 
paid. Frosts, snows, rains and fogs, compliments of 
the season, Christian Awake, Waits, Herald Angels and 
Brass bands filled life with foreboding and tarnished 
the brightest hopes. Twice Mrs. Holmroyd had recourse 
to the Bank, whose swing doors admitted her with a sa¬ 
tiric politeness and mocked her as she went, with un¬ 
dissimulated scorn. Economy, in its blackest semblance, 
dogged her. Oswald and Beryl must look for no Christ¬ 
mas gifts this year beyond their mother’s love. She 
prepared their hearts for resignation with tender care, 
but as the season of universal fellowship drew near her 
inflammable heart took fire like a yule log and filled 
her with such a warmth as gleamed far beyond the limits 
of herself. Christmas came but once a year; her chil¬ 
dren should not be denied its blessings. The Christmas 
fire, blazing in her bosom, consumed all petty pru¬ 
dence mean and base; it blazed to a zealous profligacy 
that burned up every argument thrown on to quench it. 
All that she had not, she yearned to give. For Oswald 
she bought a volume of “Robinson Crusoe” and a paint¬ 
box ; for Beryl a big new doll with flaxen hair, and a 
pair of cloth gaiters. Surely God would bless the gifts. 
Roast duck sanctified their Christmas dinner, followed 
by a plum pudding spiked with blanched almonds. 
Elizabeth helped to roast the duck and eat it; being 
further blessed to inarticulateness with silver and a pair 
of Mrs. Holmroyd’s boots. No errand boy, qualified with 
the remotest claim upon remembrance, rapped upon the 
knocker to wish the house a merry Christmas in vain. 
And Oswald, proud of the mission but dry-lipped with 
the responsibility laid upon him, bore a silver emblem 
in his hand for transmission to the snuffy Prestwich 


208 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“with mother’s compliments” on Christmas morning. He 
had grave doubts whether the dignity of this official 
might not be affronted with such a gift, but the snuffy 
Prestwich palmed it like a conjuror before Oswald could 
credit the coin had left his fingers, saying: “My re¬ 
spects to Mrs. Holmroyd and the compliments of the 
season in return” through the one nostril this trying 
time had left open to him. 

But all this—though it filled Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart 
with seasonable and festive fumes, seeming to constitute 
her a mystical partaker of the world’s bounty; a sipper 
of wassail from humanity’s cup—all this, whatever 
strength it lent to spiritual parts, made the purse falter. 
And when Christmas day was gone by, and the choice of 
dishes of this joyous banquet of kindred souls removed, 
her heart turned heavy after its emotional excess, like 
a head on the morning that succeeds the circulation of 
the flowing bowl. Pious exuberance, sad and disillu¬ 
sioned, settled down to its daily diet of hard fact. She 
heard the muffled bells of St. Gyles’s ring out the mourn¬ 
ful passing of the old year. She heard the clocks at 
midnight proclaim its life extinct. She heard the bells 
thereafter crash out into a paean of welcome to the 
year new born with a boisterous gaiety that sought to 
crush all sadness under sound. But through the clang¬ 
orous riot of tones and supertones the solemn muffle of 
the dead peal rang. For her, a mother, this birth so 
lustily commemorated was a portentous thing. Long 
after the bells were stilled, and their ropes swung drear 
and languid in the draughts that blew upon them through 
the whistling louvres; and the clattering footsteps of 
the ringers had echoed down the narrow spiral stairway, 
and the ringers (stooping their heads) had issued one by 
one through the oaken door at the foot of the tower, 
putting their collars up and staring at the stars their 


THE ORGANIST 


209 


concussive chimes had shaken, and that trembled still 
like raindrops on blown gossamer—long after this she 
lay and listened to the ringing of a phantom peal; in¬ 
terminable Bob Majors and Bob Minors of the memory, 
whose melancholy reiteration of the past pervaded all 
the present with tumultuous sadness. Nor were her tears 
the only tears that fell upon a pillow in that house, 
bruised out of aching eyelids by the cruel beauty of the 
bells. On his narrow bed in the little narrow bedroom 
above the scullery, divided from her own by the door 
that nightly custom left unlatched, and sunk two steps 
below the level of her floor, a wakeful Oswald lay, soul- 
stricken before these solemn judges of the past that 
called him to account before the bar of conscience. 

His mother’s blood flowed in his veins; her hopes and 
fears were his. This music of the bells, that never failed 
to stir her to an ecstasy of sadness so sweet as to be 
nothing short of pain, filled his heart, too, with sublime 
Wretchedness to overflowing. The pathos of the past, 
the tragedy of the present, permeated every portion of 
his small being. His very limbs grew sentient, and his 
soul—become substantial—suffered horribly from stom¬ 
ach ache. O, to be something! To Be something. 
Another year (the bells averred) was dead and gone, and 
still he was Oswald Holmroyd the sausage boy, dependent 
on his mother—who should have been her succour and 
support. No nearer being an Alderman; no nearer 
being an Organist; no nearer being a Canon, Verger, 
Town Crier, Fireman, or Anything. Filled with remorse 
that dripped in tears from his contorted eyelids like the 
great drops wrested by Elizabeth from the writhing gar¬ 
ments her wrinkled hands wrung above the wash-tub, he 
consecrated resolve anew. Imagination, wrought by 
despairing conscience to an intensity impatient of reality 
and daylight, seized its imaginary basket. No trials 


210 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


should dismay, no sufferings deter him. This visioned 
basket was his answer to the bells. Like a new year a 
new Oswald had been born. The old Oswald was al¬ 
ready dead. Henceforth . . . Hark! What was that? 
What had so shaken the four corners of his bed? As¬ 
suredly it was a sob. It was the sob accompanying 
re-birth; the sob with which (it seemed) the old Oswald 
had been delivered of the new; a startling, undissimulated 
sob that brought imagination to its senses and stopped 
the source of tears in no time. Motionless he held his 
breath, cowering from discovery into the smallest com¬ 
pass of his being. 

“Oswald!” 

Did lips of inward apprehension breathe the name, or 
lips of outward reality? So softly did it touch his hear¬ 
ing that he felt unsure, but his heart fluttered like a bird 
beneath the closing fingers of the fowler. 

“Oswald. . . .” 

His mother’s voice it was, soft as silence itself, per¬ 
suasive as sleep, fearful of ruffling the lightest slumber. 
At first his guilty wakefulness vouchsafed no sign. But 
his own silence accused him, and filled with awful fear 
lest on this first solemn morning of the New Year she 
might leave him utterly to the tortures of self-reproach, 
he made believe to hear her at last, answering in a still, 
small voice: “Yes, mother.” There was undeniable 
wetness about the voice. 

“Are you awake, Oswald?” 

“Yes, mother.” 

“I thought I heard ... You are not, not crying, 
Oswald?” 

“No, mother.” 

Two steps were taken. The presence that filled his 
doorway suffused his narrow room. Its outstretched 


THE ORGANIST 


211 


hands, putting the interceptive warmth aside, brought 
their warmth to his pillow. 

“Where are you, Oswald?” 

“Here, mother.” 

Here on his back, with his nose in the sheet that his 
fingers plucked above him; his eyes wide open, prostrate 
as a corpse. That posture, alone, confirmed her hearing 
and her heart. She stooped to kiss his face. Her lips 
slipped upon the wetness of its marbled cheeks, and their 
taste was salt. She knew too well, by now, the taste of 
tears to harbor doubt. 

“What is it, Oswald?” 

“Nothing, mother.” 

She needed to ask no more. Nothing (in the language 
of the soul) means Everything. Everything the soul 
can suffer, of darkness that dismays and the brightness 
it cannot bear. Her own misery became protective in 
a moment. Her arms encompassed him. His weakness 
was as a welcome well of clear comfort, whose draught 
refreshed and strengthened her; for nought in the world 
so sweetens sorrow as its kind. Without a word their 
mutual troubles made exchange of comfort, and tears 
staunched tears. 


2 

Of Miss Burford during these wintry days no more 
was seen. Yet the expectation of her visit, sinking like 
the last embers in a grate, was replenished on the brink 
of expiry by some reference on her father’s part, either 
in the form of a question: “My daughter hasn’t been 
to see you yet, ma’am?” or affirmatively: “She means 
coming to see you one of these days, I know. But there’s 
so many callers at this time of the year, and being with¬ 
out a regular servant too, ma’am . . .” 


212 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


On the other hand, the Councillor himself, as though 
led by a sort of second nature to the Holmroyd door, 
became a visitor quite customarily to be reckoned with. 
No discoverable purpose brought him, yet his visits 
seemed so adequately to explain themselves that specula¬ 
tion after his departure was left in no painful uncertainty 
as to whether the call signified a pie or a pupil. Nor 
did he induce the tension of uncertainty attaching to 
a double knock, for after his third visit he made no use 
of the street knocker at all. Somewhere in the neighbor¬ 
hood of tea-time after the lapse of a few days his 
tread might be expected. The muffled thumping of his 
broad shoulders against the passage walls sufficiently 
announced his coming. At the parlour door his knuckles 
rapped a firm but courteous intimation as though, be¬ 
fore all, the owner’s politeness sought not to take ad¬ 
vantage of the assembled company or come upon it 
unaware. After which, attention being thus summoned 
to his presence he would open the door two inches to 
admit the enquiry: 

“Are you at home, ma’am?” in a voice loud enough to 
clear all misunderstanding. But it was not until his 
hostess answered, begging him to enter, that he put all 
further formality aside and disclosed himself to sight, 
wearing his hat. “Don’t let me disturb you, ma’am,” was 
his unalterable formula. “I’m just on my way . . .” 
With which, his overcoat spread open, his hands plunged 
into the deep pockets of it, he moved at once to the hearth¬ 
rug (that prescriptive place of man’s authority in the 
domestic circle) where, towering above the sitters at the 
table, on whom and which he looked down with a bland 
and interested gaze, he took off his hat. From his post 
of observation on the hearthrug he begged they would 
continue their meal, and supervised their eating of it with 
a regard as watchful and participant as if the food were 



THE ORGANIST 


213 


destined rather for his own mouth than theirs. The first 
embarrassment occasioned by his large presence being 
overcome, table politeness—put on its mettle by the 
honour of performing before so important an onlooker— 
exerted every effort, and Oswald and Beryl ate their best. 
The Councillor was not a waster of words like his 
daughter—who, apparently for the reason that words 
cost nothing, inclined to extravagance in this direction. 
If he had nothing to say, nothing was what he said; quite 
content, it seemed, to participate in a silence that bespoke 
itself friendly and companionable. He alluded to the gas, 
and asked Mrs. Holmroyd with municipal interest how 
she found the quality, ma’am. Was she satisfied with the 
town water? Who, if he might venture to inquire, ma’am, 
was her landlord? Indeed! What rent (if she felt in¬ 
clined to answer the question), did he ask her for this 
house? Indeed! That was a nice bright fire she had. 
And a nice clean burning coal, by the look of it. Was 
it Silkstone or Manvers? “That’s not my butter you’re 
using there, ma’am, surely!” “I thought I wasn’t mis¬ 
taken. Judging by the look of it I should pronounce it a 
bit rank, ma’am.” 

That he did not partake of a cup of tea along with them 
reproached no fault of invitation on Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
part, for she never failed to pass the compliment, albeit 
in the end with the uninsistent voice that takes refusal 
for granted; since the mere suggestion of hospitality was 
enough to make the Councillor brandish his hat as if re¬ 
minded of the flight of time, and even put it on in pre¬ 
paration for departure, protesting he had not come for 
that, and his own tea would be waiting of him (thank 
her all the same, ma’am). On one occasion, however, 
about the middle of the Christmas holidays, when Mrs. 
Holmroyd had said, “I am afraid it’s no use my offering 
you a cup of tea, Mr. Burford . . .” he answered, “Not at 


214 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


all, ma’am. I was just on the point of going.” And 
put his hat on, beneath which he had already proceeded 
as far as the door when suddenly to everybody’s surprise, 
he took it off again and returned bareheaded to the 
hearthrug. “After all, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve declined 
your kindness a deal of times. I don’t want to seem to 
throw it in your face. It’s very good of you to ask me. 
Thank you. Just one cup, if you please.” He added 
the prodigious compliment in a plain voice that scorned 
collusion with flattery: “Your tea-table always looks 
so clean and tempting, ma’am.” Mrs. Holmroyd, though 
flushing to an unexpected compliment paid with such 
obvious honesty, sought to decline acceptance of the 
Councillor’s tribute as if it had been monetary, saying 
she feared there was not very much about her little table 
to tempt anybody. “It is very simple,” she remarked. 

“Simple,” acquiesced the Councillor, who laid his hat 
upon the coal box and declined to be relieved of his over¬ 
coat on the ground that he did not propose to stay, 
ma’am, “What’s better than simple so long as simple’s 
good? It’s honest. There’s no fuss and nonsense about 
it. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.” With 
which he sank spaciously into the easy chair that Oswald, 
obeying a secret sign from his mother, pushed up timidly 
for the guest’s reception between the table and the fire¬ 
place, and sat back for some moments at ease, his broad 
toes to the fire, his hands interlocked across his watch- 
chain, his eyes directed to the ceiling, as though he sub¬ 
jected the new experience to the test of critical enquiry. 
Nor did he fail to bring a full judgment to bear on the 
fare provided, and such a final opinion as he pronounced 
upon its excellence was neither lightly nor easily come by. 
True, Mrs. Holmroyd’s teacups were only small, but he 
accepted three of them with no more persuasion than 
accompanied the first, saying “Thank you, ma’am. Is 


THE ORGANIST 


215 


that my three and tenpenny?” Being assured it was, he 
settled down to a more complacent enjoyment of it. “I 
felt I couldn’t be mistaken in my own tea. Nobody 
couldn’t wish for a better. I don’t care where they 
bought, or what price they paid for it.” The bread, too, 
won his commendation. “Do you bake it yourself, 
ma’am?” Receiving her assurance that she did, and that 
it owed its excellence to his special best roller-milled 
superfine flour, he consumed it with redoubled satisfaction; 
and even undertook at this point to remove his overcoat 
out of tribute to Mrs. Holmroyd’s table and the com¬ 
fortable brightness of her fire. “I see your room’s meant 
to be sat in, ma’am,” he conceded, and looked around it 
with obvious intent to assimilate all the comfort visible. 
Mrs. Holmroyd explained that it was the only room 
she had. 

“And the only room you want,” the Councillor decided, 
“if two’s going to be a trouble to you. Comfort is 
comfort, ma’am, just as quality’s quality. Where there 
isn’t quality, quantity won’t help improve it.” 

From the consummation of the meal he turned his in¬ 
terest more directly to the fire, which truth to tell blazed 
with a most sociable and contentful warmth, and 
appeared to repose his thoughts in the attractive bright¬ 
ness of its flames. Something in his posture, or some 
half-conscious movement of a hand towards his breast 
pocket prompted Mrs. Holmroyd’s hospitality to suggest 
that if Mr. Burford smoked at all . . . “I do, ma’am,” 
the Councillor replied immediately. “But rarely in the 
house. . . . It’s not,” he added, with a voice darkened 
by experience, “every lady that cares for the smell of 
smoking indoors. Particularly cigars. They say it 
clings to the curtains, and tarnishes the picture frames 
and furniture.” Mrs. Holmroyd begged at once that 
he let no such objections on her behalf deter him. For 


216 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


her own part she found the smell of tobbaco-smoke not 
disagreeable. In fact, she liked it. Her husband used 
to smoke occasionally. 

“Why,” said the Councillor, reapplying his hand to 
the breast pocket and drawing forth a bulky leather 
cigar-case, “you show your common-sense in that, ma’am. 
I think so too. But all ladies doesn’t share your opinion. 
My daughter doesn’t. She says it’s no use trying to 
keep a house respectable if men insists on smoking in it. 
She says houses was never meant for it. You might 
as well cook in the drawing-room . . . 

“. . . I won’t deny,” he said, “that she keeps my house 
clean. She studies it a deal more than her own health. 
There’s no house in Daneborough gets better looked after. 
It gets looked after too well. But as I sometimes tell 
her, Cleanliness isn’t everything. If a place has got to 
be made uncomfortable because it’s clean, let’s have a 
little less cleanliness and more comfort. A house didn’t 
ought to be a museum, ma’am, to my way of thinking,, 
for folks to peep at and go about in on tip-toe. It ought 
to be lived in and enjoyed. Like this.” 

The eulogy, coming from such a source, and bearing 
the indisputable stamp of sincerity, did not fail to 
gratify the recipient; and even to cause Oswald and his 
sister to turn eyes of reawakened interest around the 
little room. Each tried hard to see it through their 
visitor’s eyes, and Oswald (suddenly succeeding) realized 
the conviction that it was in truth a very wondrous, 
lovely home he lived in. He was less assured, and convic¬ 
tion stumbled over disappointment, to hear his mother in 
her gentle voice reply: 

“I’m afraid, Mr. Burford, your daughter would 
scarcely regard my little home as a house at all.” She 
could not refuse the petition of her pride to add: “I 


THE ORGANIST 


217 


did not myself when first we came. I found it very 
small.” 

And in truth, as Oswald discovered on looking once 
more around the parlour, (this time through his mother’s 
eyes) the room seemed very small. Probably his mother 
was right. Miss Burford would consider it no house 
at all. 

“There’s only one way to judge a home, ma’am,” said 
the Councillor oracularly, “and that’s to know if you’re 
comfortable in it. If you are, then it’s a home. If 
you’re not, it doesn’t signify a brass farthing how big 
it happens to be.” He appeared to be speaking now 
with his eye upon a page of experience invisible to Mrs. 
Holmroyd. “I take it you’re very comfortable here, 
ma’am,” he said. Oswald awaited his mother’s answer 
to this direct enquiry with solemn interest, and was in¬ 
expressibly relieved to hear with what fervour she assured 
their guest of the happiness derived from these familiar 
walls. 

“I thought so, ma’am,” the Councillor commented. 
“If you wasn’t happy here, you’ll excuse me for saying I 
should think you hard to please. But you’d make any 
home comfortable. It’s your nature, ma’am.” 

After the successful experiment of this first repast, 
Councillor Burford showed a diminishing diffidence in 
partaking of Mrs. Holmroyd’s hospitality. He rarely 
said No to the proffer of a cup of tea “to set him home,” 
as he expressed it; and was usually prepared to enjoy 
some minutes in the easy chair with his hat laid on the 
coal-box, and his feet to the fire, and his overcoat thrown 
open, sucking contentedly at his cigar in the intervals 
of asking after the coal and gas and waterpipes and the 
general health. His presence lent a certain comfort to 
the little home, a bulwark-confidence encouraging to 


218 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


dependent hearts, but there was one topic he touched on 
that filled his listeners with a secret consternation,—and 
that was Oswald’s future. 

He did not invariably allude to it, but there was (par¬ 
ticularly in every silence) the fear that he might; and the 
uncomfortable fear of it became a spectre. Whether he 
reverted to the subject through sheer conversational pov¬ 
erty, or through any deeper solicitude for Oswald’s wel¬ 
fare, not even Mrs. Holmroyd could decide, but the con¬ 
sequence for her remained the same. Questions as to 
Oswald’s health were easy to dispose of, since once the 
Councillor had uttered them he seemed to take small in¬ 
terest in the answer given. But when he asked of Mrs. 
Holmroyd if she had lent any further thought to her 
son’s future—which his lips affirmed was not that distant, 
comfortable form of it with which irresolution veiled the 
question, but a future so immediate and concise as to par¬ 
take of the perplexities of the present—her self-possession 
lost countenance, and her smile grew strained. However 
casually introduced and tranquillized beneath the rhyth¬ 
mic puffing of the Councillor’s cigar, the subject took 
conscience by the collar; it walked with a flat constabu¬ 
lary tread familiar to Oswald’s fears. Mrs. Holmroyd, 
struggling to keep the shrinking edges of her smile over 
composure, twisted her wedding ring with gentle 
uncertainty. 

“Oswald’s father,” she said on one occasion, “was, of 
course, an architect.” 

“Indeed,” said the Councillor. “And do you think of 
making him an architect too, ma’am?” 

He had taken the cigar out of his mouth, and held it 
now extended between his cleft fingers in an attitude that 
seemed to put too much responsibility upon her answer. 
She faltered, with an uneasy look at Oswald. On this 
point, she confessed, they had scarcely come (as yet) to 


THE ORGANIST 


219 


a decision. She trusted, of course, to make Something 
of her son. He had undoubted talents. 

“Talents, has he?” asked the Councillor, abruptly 
confronting this pretentious word. “What are they, 
ma’am ?” 

Demanded at the pistol’s point like this she knew not 
what they were. Nothing, she feared, that any language 
of the flesh could adequately utter. But the Councillor’s 
cigar, attached to space by a silken damoclean thread, 
still challenged her from the fork of his extended fingers. 

“He is very fond of poetry,” she said, feeling the utter 
feebleness of words to express the wonders of her son’s 
attainments or to justify her pride in them. “He reads 
a great deal. And he writes too. Just before Christ¬ 
mas he wrote a little hymn . . . He has a decided talent 
for drawing. And for music ...” She struggled 
through the tottering list of accomplishments that not 
all her bosom’s ardour could kindle to convincing warmth. 
The Councillor’s eye remained at the end of her tribute 
coldly unmoved. “Indeed, ma’am,” was all he said, and 
put the suspended cigar back to his lips once more with 
the air of one whose interest has been lent in vain. With 
an effort to retrieve a situation that her defective advo¬ 
cacy had so prejudiced, she made haste to inform the 
visitor that later on . . . though probably not this term, 
it was (as she had told him) her hope to send Oswald to 
the Grammar School. At present she was not sure . . . 
she rather doubted; she was afraid she could not quite 
afford to do so. 

“Then why try, ma’am?” the Councillor taxed her 
uncompromisingly. She attempted hurriedly to repair 
the error of a misgiving overstated. 

“Of course,” she qualified, “. . . perhaps by making 
sacrifices.” 

“Sacrifices!” the Councillor repeated, taking the word 


220 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


from her and seeming by the tone of his voice to expose 
the unworthiness of it. “Make nothing of the sort, 
ma’am, believe me. Why should you? It’s a big mistake 
for folks to sacrifice themselves for their children’s ed¬ 
ucation. If it can’t be done without sacrifices, don’t do 
it at all. You’d be a deal better advised to keep your 
money, ma’am. It’ll be more use to you. What’s edu¬ 
cation, when all’s said and done? It’s nothing. As often 
as not it gets too proud to work, and thinks it ought to 
be paid for knowing something that’s no use to anybody. 
Give your lad good meat and serviceable clothes, ma’am, 
and send him to a sensible school where they’ll teach him 
to read and write and figure, and knock the nonsense out 
of him. That’s my advice. Let him start to earn his 
own living before he get ideas. My father never made 
any sacrifices for me, and I’ve lived to be thankful he 
didn’t. Why should you make sacrifices for your son, 
ma’am? Learn him to make sacrifices for you. It’s his 
duty. The only sacrifices that does a man a ha’porth of 
good is them he makes himself. I went behind the counter 
when I was twelve. It’s done me more good than a hun¬ 
dred sacrifices, or a score of schoolmasters. Teach a 
lad that he’s got to be his own schoolmaster. If there’s 
anything about him he’ll learn a deal quicker from his 
own mistakes that he’s got to pay for than from a 
teacher.” 

Not, he was careful to explain, that he advocated the 
total abolition of schooling. Let Oswald be sent to St. 
Gyles’s School, or the English School, or St. Saviour’s 
School for the matter of that—albeit he was prompt to 
emphasize the fact that St. Saviour’s would not be his 
choice. 

From such educational sentiments, as may be supposed, 
Mrs. Holmroyd recoiled, doubly at a disadvantage by the 
knowledge that any argument in favour of a loftier view 


THE ORGANIST 


221 


of learning must, to reach its object, pass first through 
the Councillor’s own imperfections. Nor was Oswald less 
disquieted by these views in reference to his future, and 
his anxiety hung like lead upon his mother’s question 
whether the schools just mentioned were “quite the schools, 
Mr. Burford!” 

“I went to St. Gyles’s School myself,” the Councillor 
affirmed, “when I was a lad—but that’s getting on for 
fifty years ago. The edjication’s gone down there, in 
my opinion, since then. I sent my son to the English 
School ma’am, and if I’d a dozen of ’em I’d send ’em all 
to the same place. You can’t improve upon the English 
School. If you want a good cheap school where your son 
will be taught to write and figure and be a sharp, smart, 
obedient lad . . . send him there. That’s my opinion, 
ma’am.” 

It was his opinion. She thanked him for it with such 
gentle graciousness that Oswald’s heart misgave him, be¬ 
lieving from her tone of voice the visitor’s advice had been 
accepted, and that assuredly before long he would begin 
his dreadful education at the English School. 

After the Councillor had taken leave, with his two hands 
plunged in the two side pockets of his outspread overcoat, 
Mrs. Holmroyd for a long while sat gazing at the fire, 
slowly twisting her wedding ring upon her slender finger. 
No reference was made to the dire topic of discussion, and 
Oswald dared no more broach this than he would have 
dared to penetrate the darkness of the cellar for confirma¬ 
tion of the terrors contained in it. Instead, he opened 
his mother’s Christmas gift of “Robinson Crusoe,” and im¬ 
mersed himself in its magic pages to demonstrate how 
good a reader he was. And he besought his mother to 
sharpen a pencil for him that he might portray the Man¬ 
sion House on a sheet of cream-laid note paper, and prove 
what an artist he was. On the other side of this notable 


222 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


production he drew the wonderful memorial he meant to 
raise above his father’s grave, and the house he should 
acquire for the three of them to live in, out of the rich 
rewards of being a gentleman. But bedtime made his 
doubts insufferable. And at last, when he came to kiss 
his mother’s cheek and say good night, the tenderness of 
her embrace lent a panic courage to his lips. 

“ . . . Am I going to the English School, mother?” 
he asked. He asked the question in a rapid undertone, 
with downcast eyes that feared to take any part in so 
momentous a demand. Receiving no answer after awhile 
he glanced at his mother’s face, and was dismayed to find 
it bore no resemblance to the gentle countenance last 
looked on. A dreadful change, indeed, had in the interval 
come over it, disruptive of serenity. Turning hurriedly 
from his wondering gaze, as if it hurt her, his mother 
passed to the mantelpiece, in tears. 

3 

The little school had already reassembled, and pride 
was growing anxious to be insulted with the first payment 
of its last term’s labour, when Miss Burford called. 
True, the Councillor had intimated the likelihood of his 
daughter’s visit more than a week ago, saying: “I think 
my daughter will be giving you a call on Monday, ma’am.” 
But such notification had been tendered before without 
result, and though Mrs. Holmroyd made due preparation 
to receive the visitor she was not surprised when the 
afternoon passed with no louder summons at the door 
than imagination administered. Miss Burford did not 
call on Monday because, being still without a maid, she 
had decided that the Drawing-Room could not go for 
a single day longer “without being something done at” 
in her expressive and forceful idiom; nothing having been 


THE ORGANIST 


223 


done at it since the room was turned out, with Elizabeth’s 
aid, the week before. 

Nor did she call on Tuesday, because Tuesday was 
Elizabeth’s day, and Elizabeth’s sight grew more and 
more defective, needing Miss Burford’s sharper sight to 
supervise it, and Miss Burford’s raptorial forefinger 
to pounce upon the glaring instances of the enthusiast’s 
omission. 

On Wednesday Miss Burford did not call because, pfff 1 
the dust in her father’s bedroom was indescribable. 
Where men picked up all the dust they brought into 
a house she did not know. No sooner did she take a 
brush to the carpet, just to see, than it rose up in clouds. 
She had to go out upon the landing to cough. Never had 
she seen such a sight in her life. What would a doctor 
think if her father happened to be ill, and they showed 
him into such a room! 

But on the Thursday, by dint of rising an hour earlier 
than her wont and working—as she phrased it—“like a 
Trojan,” she succeeded in paying her long deferred visit 
to Spring Bank Gardens at last. 

Being somewhat antagonistically aware that Mrs. 
Holmroyd was a lady with a very composed and trying 
manner of speech, and a countenance so politely soft as 
to yield no visible imprint of any impression stamped 
upon it; and being much exercised in her mind as to how 
much of the Burford history (if any) had been delivered 
into her keeping by Elizabeth, whose rejoinders to oblique 
enquiry on this point were vague and unconvincing, she 
prepared herself for the visit to Mrs. Holmroyd with 
punctilious exactitude of toilet. She brushed her com¬ 
pany skirt inside and out with the same thoroughness 
that she would have devoted to a carpet. She exhumed 
her hat from its place in the camphorated wardrobe where 
it lay swathed in a couple of silk kerchiefs, re-titivating 


224 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


its torpid millinery with endless deft and still dissatisfied 
touches. She sewed new lace frills inside her bodice 
sleeves and neck; breathed out the creases in her kid 
gloves; polished her company boots, and providing her¬ 
self with two handkerchiefs (the one for usage, if required, 
in the street; the other to draw out for the first time in 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s sitting-room), she set off at last with 
a morocco leather card case in her hand, accompanied 
by an elderly lady and a precocious female child with 
straight legs. 

Chiefly because her sitting-room was rather less orderly 
than she would have wished any unsympathetic eye to 
see it, Mrs. Holmroyd had the presentiment that visitors 
would take her at a disadvantage this afternoon. The 
moment that the knock resounded through the empty 
passage below, her uneasy conscience leaped instantly to 
its feet with the cry: “Miss Burford!” She would have 
wished to pay her personal appearance some trifling 
attention before descending to receive her visitors, but 
being acquainted with the nature of Miss Burford’s eye 
she hastened downstairs at once to protect her parlour 
from its depredations. It was even as she had feared. 
Miss Burford, of all the chairs within the room, had 
chosen with unerring instinct that one which afforded the 
finest view of its defects. The elderly lady, in the re¬ 
poseful posture of age that seems ever grateful for an 
opportunity to seat itself, occupied the easy chair‘famil¬ 
iar to Councillor Burford’s bulk; her head on one side; 
her eyes partly closed; of a disposition to snatch slumber 
if undisturbed. Upright on a chair by the window sat 
the young lady with the straight legs, silenced by these 
new surroundings which she imbibed intently through eye 
and ear, and awaiting developments with an expression 
of interest more alert than anxious. The first chill 
greetings were exchanged. Miss Burford bowed. The 


THE ORGANIST 


225 


old lady rocked her head, which—set in motion—continued 
amicably for some time after like a china mandarin or 
a rocking horse. The young lady’s body grew rigid, 
whilst her glance darted birdlike onto each limb that 
moved or mouth that spoke. 

It was indeed with reference to the prospective new 
pupil (who resolved herself shortly into the young lady 
with the upright back and active eyes) that Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s visitors had called. The young lady, it 
appeared, was the granddaughter of the old lady in the 
easy chair, and there had been a question of sending her 
to school. Certainly it was high time. Something should 
be done with her. 

“She’s more than I can manage, at times, Mrs. 
Holmroyd,” the old lady confided in a placid voice. “So 
we thought somebody else should see what they can make 
of her.” 

“Of course, nothing is settled at present,” Miss 
Burford threw in guardedly for Mrs. Holmroyd’s benefit. 
“But something will have to be settled,” she added in a 
tone whose warning purpose was now directed to the 
young lady with the upright back. “She can’t go on 
like this. She’s being utterly ruined. People are 
beginning to cry shame of her.” From the chair occupied 
by the young lady issued a sound faintly resembling 
“they aren’t, then!” which, Miss Burford’s keen ear de¬ 
tecting, she silenced with a tart: “Don’t contradict 
me. I say they are.” 

“You’re putting her up to it,” said the young lady 
with the straight legs. “I heard you talking it all over 
as we was coming.” 

“She’s a thoroughly spoilt girl,” Miss Burford pro¬ 
nounced with a patch of temper in her hard cheek, 
ignoring the young lady and addressing herself exclusively 
to Mrs. Holmroyd, to whom the prospective pupil’s faults 


226 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


were exhaustively disclosed with a candour that made 
not the least concession to the object of it. The young 
lady, it transpired, was possessed of a curious and 
difficult temper. Her father had the same temper. 
Her grandfather had it too, “but not so bad.” 

“She doesn’t get it from me,” the old lady explained. 
“Mine’s not that sort at all. It never was—even when 
I was younger, and reckoned to have one. It used to 
be sharp, I won’t deny. But when it was over it was 
over and done with, and I didn’t bear the least grudge 
against them I’d spoke to.” But her granddaughter’s 
temper, Miss Burford explained, was of that protracted 
and indefinite variety most baffling to diagnose or deal 
with. It appeared that the culprit was capable of sulk¬ 
ing a whole morning without letting anybody as much 
as suspect she was sulking at all. 

“I sulked for two days, once,” the young lady inter¬ 
posed, who, far from showing any resentment at this ex¬ 
posure of her failings, took the most interested part in 
their display. 

“Two days!” the old lady enquired incredulously. 
“Are you sure, now, or are you telling a story? When 
was that?” 

“Last year, when you wouldn’t let me go to the circus. 
You haven’t gone and forgotten that!” 

The old lady’s enquiry melted in a gaze of almost 
rapturous remembrance as she confirmed this shocking 
boast to Mrs. Holmroyd. 

“And so she did. To be sure. I forget things, with¬ 
out she’s there to remind me. She was a very naughty 
girl that time.” 

Miss Burford with visible acerbity called on Mrs. 
Holmroyd to bear witness to this display of ridiculous 
indulgence, crying: “Did ever you hear!—You spoil 
her!” she said, turning on the old lady with in- 


THE ORGANIST 227 

dignation. “I’ve no patience with you. You’re to blame 
as much as her. You positively encourage her.” 

The old lady, subsiding comfortably upon admission 
as if it were a sofa for the mind to rest on, confessed to 
Mrs. Holmroyd (seemingly not displeased with Miss 
Burford’s rebuke) : “Why! What can you do when 
there’s only one? It’s not the same as if she was a whole 
family. You’re forced to spoil ’em a bit when they’re 
by theirselves.” 

“She wants a good slap bottom,” Miss Burford averred 
with a vigour that imparted momentarily to her hard 
face the uplifted menace of a hand. 

“I don’t, then!” the young lady declared, not less 
emphatically, as though in no doubt respecting the nat¬ 
ure of the remedy suggested. “I wouldn’t have one. 
I never have had one. I wouldn’t let nobody give me one.” 

“You’d have what you were given if I’d to do with 
you,” Miss Burford affirmed concisely. 

The old lady, rocking a head of indulgence towards 
both parties in the dispute, as if appreciating the merits 
of their respective contentions, admitted that perhaps 
she was “a bit to blame.” But did Miss Burford seriously 
suggest she should take active measures at her time of 
life? She was past that now. She hadn’t the strength. 

“I get so short of breath,” she confided to Mrs. 
Holmroyd, “without That.” And explained a momentary 
convulsion of her features with the one word “Rheuma¬ 
tism!” Adding: “In my knees. Just there .” 

After further conversation (with the young lady’s 
pert assistance) a varied assortment of other defects 
was brought to view; including indolence, untidiness, 
and more than suspicion of a general disregard for truth. 

“She tells downright falsehoods, Mrs. Holmroyd,” 
Miss Burford declared indignantly. “You can’t believe a 
word she says.” 


228 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Falsehoods we won’t call them,” the old lady remarked 
with lenience. “Although there’s no denying she makes 
up some naughty stories to deceive her grandma. But 
it’s no good. People that tells stories always gets 
found out sooner or later.” 

The young lady interposed: “They don’t. There’s 
two you haven’t found out yet. Two you never will find 
out.” 

“Two?” said the old lady with revived interest. 
“Which two’s them?” 

The young lady, becoming oracular, replied: “ J 

know.” 

“My word!” exclaimed Miss Burford with an explosion 
of her dark face, “. . . if only I’d the handling of her.” 
Falsehood she pronounced with indignation to be abomin¬ 
able. “When you can’t believe what people says to you, 
there’s only one thing they’re fit for. Let them be 
domestic servants straight away and be done with it.” 

This pronouncement modulating into a key dear to 
Miss Burford’s heart introduced a long thematic di¬ 
gression in which the ostensible object of the visit was 
lost sight of. But on its reintroduction Mrs. Holmroyd 
was relieved to hear a tone of greater confidence and 
certainty. In fact, the young lady of the straight legs 
appeared to take the issue of the interview so much for 
granted that she asked Miss Burford: “When have I 
got to come?” To which Miss Burford’s answer was, 
“When you’re told. And not before.” For the Coun¬ 
cillor’s daughter had still much curiosity to gratify, 
and did not believe in arriving too hastily at decisions, 
even where these had been already taken. Did Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s terms include slates and school books? 
Would there be any reduction in the event of unavoid¬ 
able absence? Respecting the schoolroom; did Miss 
Burford understand it was upstairs? Being assured that 


THE ORGANIST 


229 


it was, she asked if they might be permitted to view the 
room, inspired (as Mrs. Holmroyd was aware) by the 
laudable desire to probe as deep into the mysteries of 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s house as possible. The aged lady, on 
learning that a visit to the schoolroom involved not only 
the forfeiture of her chair but the laboured ascent 
of a flight of stairs, begged Mrs. Holmroyd to ex¬ 
cuse her, tapping her bosom with a plaintive hand 
and shaking her head over it, saying she would rather 
sit where she was. Mrs. Holmroyd excused her cheer¬ 
fully, and would have been not less willing to excuse 
Miss Burford, but the latter had already risen to her 
feet with an air of energy that put any such lingering 
hope to flight. 

4 

Partly owing to the confidence engendered by the 
acquisition of this new pupil; partly owing to the de¬ 
pression disseminated by the New Year’s bells; partly 
owing to the Councillor’s enquiries respecting Oswald; 
partly to the fact that Mr. Rencil, being brought face to 
face with Mrs. Holmroyd and her children one recent 
Saturday, raised his hat and wished her a bright New 
Year; but largely to those emotional true reasons that 
woman hides from the sight of mankind with the instinctive 
delicacy for underwear, Mrs. Holmroyd called upon the 
Organist of St. Saviour’s that same evening. 

In view of the doubtfulness of its issue the visit was 
kept secret from her children, who consequently did not 
accompany her. Beryl she committed to the care of 
Oswald, both in turn being confided to the overlordship 
of the next-door neighbour, who undertook to look in upon 
them from time to time, and held herself ready to answer 
their first summons in the event of need. 


230 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Despite the fact that Mrs. Holmroyd’s errand was 
totally unconnected with pies or pupils, and that she 
came to enquire terms and not to state them, she stopped 
before the Organist’s name-plate at last with some of that 
trepidation which, in these days, was become a reckon- 
able part of her. She had been actuated by an impulse 
whose fierce fires, subsiding now, left her a little enervated, 
a little questioning, perhaps. The figure of the Councillor, 
that had not been without its influence in driving her 
to this door, rose up before her as she reached it, with 
a look of outraged reason; its silent lips shaped to the 
expostulation: “What? After all our talks ma’am? 
Music lessons? Sacrifices? It’s madness.” She plucked 
the bell with hesitating fingers. After all . . . This was 
but an enquiry. Nothing (as Miss Burford would have 
said) had been Settled. All she sought to know was Mr. 
Rencil’s terms. At the worst, if these turned out to 
be too high, she could express her gratitude for the im- 
formation and, of course, her little boy was rather young 
at present. Later on ... if Mr. Rencil were at liberty 
to take him . . . 

In the midst of these improvisations the brass plate 
on which her gaze was fixed, reading and re-reading Mr. 
Rencil’s name, receded suddenly from sight, and was 
transformed into a white apron. That no Miss Burford 
controlled the internal economy of this house seemed 
adequately proved by the almost friendly smile with 
which the maid acknowledged Mrs. Holmroyd’s enquiry, 
as if it were a pleasure to answer it. Mr. Rencil was 
at home. Would the visitor please walk in. It was 
evident that the maid had been trained not to damp the 
ardour of any caller showing the least disposition to 
indulge in music lessons. In fact, the welcome with which 
she made the Organist’s house free to Mrs. Holmroyd 
caused the latter to entertain a sudden qualm lest she 


THE ORGANIST 


231 


were being admitted on false pretences, and she asked 
somewhat anxiously if Mr. Rencil were engaged, but the 
maid seemed too intent on the joyful task of conducting 
her visitor to pay any heed to such a minor question. 
Begging Mrs. Holmroyd to follow, she tripped up the 
staircase in advance with a nimbleness that allowed no re¬ 
call, and was already lost to sight in a ruffle of skirts when 
Mrs. Holmroyd set polite foot on the first stair. The 
carpet on which she trod was Axminister, and for all it 
made no pretence of being new its quality of noiselessness 
and soft pile that comforted the foot were already notice¬ 
able to one whose occupation denied her the consolation 
of a stair-carpet in term time. It sent her memory back 
to the days when she, too, had trod on carpets as thick 
and soft as this, and infinitely richer; when the fact of 
their softness and their soundlessness had evoked in her 
no dreamy sense of unreality as now. The house itself 
was smaller, far, than the house her happiness had once 
been mistress of, but by comparison with the present 
home in Spring Bank Gardens, it appeared spacious. The 
staircase mounted (not precipitously, like her own) from 
an ample entrance hall, and the rail of the balustrade 
on which Mrs. Holmroyd laid her hand was of polished 
broad mahogany. Had such a balustrade been hers how 
Oswald might have slid down it. In place of the two 
deal benches at right angles, that occupied the small 
landing in Spring Bank Gardens, was a carved-oak Jaco¬ 
bean chest between two carved oak chairs. An impressive 
eight-day clock with a copper face ticked away in a corner 
with the bass voice of a magnificent escapement. By 
the door of the room on the first floor overlooking the 
street, whose transverse bars of light so fascinated Oswald 
on Friday evenings, the maid awaited Mrs. Holmroyd 
with the smile for an old friend recognized after a long 
absence. 


232 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Mrs. Holmroyd . . .” 

From an upholstered wicker chair by the fireplace a 
lady arose who had been stooping, until the moment of 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s entrance, over a piece of fancy work 
in coloured silks. Mrs. Holmroyd recognized her imme¬ 
diately as the Organist’s wife, whom she had often noticed 
at St. Saviour’s, sometimes sitting in the nave, sometimes 
in the chancel pew beneath the decorative stars and lilies 
of the organ pipes. She was still youthful, showing coiled 
hair of an attractive brown, and soft blue e} 7 es dilated, 
probably, and made more lustrous by the close nature 
of the needlework on which, so recently, they had been 
engaged. Her dress was of deep magenta with velvet 
at the wrists and neck. Between the slender white thumb 
and finger of her right hand she still held, with a precise 
and delicate touch, her needle attached to a strand of 
pale green silk, but she threaded this deftly into the stuff 
she worked on as Mrs. Holmroyd came forward, and 
held out the hand released from it with a very spontaneous 
and friendly welcome. “Do come in, Mrs. Holmroyd. I 
think my husband is in his study. He will not be long.” 
The hand thus extended to Mrs. Holmroyd was hot, and 
there showed more colour in the cheekbones of the organ¬ 
ist’s wife, emphasizing their salience, than Mrs. Holmroyd 
cared to see. She commented to herself: “The poor 
thing is delicate. I do not like that colour. She should 
not stoop too closely over needlework. It is bad for the 
chest.” 

The two women seated themselves in a sociable silence, 
disturbed only by the rustle of adjusted skirts. Each, 
as she sat, sought some friendly phrase with which con¬ 
versation might be set upon its feet. Mrs. Rencil, drop¬ 
ping impulsively on one knee before the fire, picked up 
the occasional poker and split one of the coals into a 
blaze. Mrs. Holmroyd expressed the polite hope that 


THE ORGANIST 


233 


her arrival had not put an untimely end to Mrs. Rencil’s 
work. The organist’s wife reassured her. She had 
been on the point of putting her work away when Mrs. 
Holmroyd was announced. “I only took up the needle 
for a moment. My husband and I are going out to dine 
this evening. . . . With Canon Quexley,” she explained. 
The remark, innocent though it was, seemed to send a 
chill and alienating breath over Mrs. Holmroyd’s expand- 
ing sympathies. Pride of poverty, ever too sensitive, 
believed it detected a note of conscious satisfaction in 
the words that made the blazing fire and the face of the 
organist’s wife in a moment less friendly. She tried to 
think the fault was hers, and to extinguish the unworthy 
flame of jealousy lit by this casual statement in her breast. 
The mere word “dining” oppressed her with its superior¬ 
ity, seeming to elevate itself unpleasantly above her pres¬ 
ent state in life. Since her husband’s death she had never 
dined. 

Without laying further stress upon this theme so 
lightly introduced, Mrs. Rencil picked up the piece of work 
on which she had been engaged and held it out for the 
visitor’s criticism and advice. The act, so simple and 
impulsive, reproached Mrs. Holmroyd’s unworthy feeling, 
and gave back instantly to the fire and Mrs. Rencil’s 
face their former friendship. The mother of Oswald had 
been mistaken; her foolish pride had played her false. 
With desire to make atonement for her base suspicion 
she contributed her interest whole-heartedly to the piece 
of work, that declared itself to be a table-centre in egg¬ 
shell silk, embroidered with pansies at each corner, and 
edged with old gold. Mrs. Rencil, using the needle as 
a pointer, explained the scheme of decoration, and 
descanted on her choice of silks. Did Mrs. Holmroyd 
care for this green? Did she think the violet too vivid? 
What would Mrs. Holmroyd recommend for the centre? 


234 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Roses or chrysanthemums? “I am sure you can help me, 
Mrs. Holmroyd. I always feel that you have such ex¬ 
cellent taste. I do so admire the way you dress your 
children.” 

This unexpected tribute to her taste and children from 
the Organist’s wife, touched Mrs. Holmroyd profoundly. 
She could only bow her head, clinging with gloved thumb 
and finger to an edge of the table-centre under pretence 
of its protracted scrutiny until the lump of bitter sweet¬ 
ness in her throat dissolved. The fire, about whose gleam¬ 
ing coals celestial amoretti, and not mere flames, frolicked 
and played, seemed to irradiate a divine warmth to the 
very heart of her solitude. The face of the Organist’s 
wife, transformed by the ecstatic eyesight of a soul for 
true fellowship with its kind, assumed a rare and sudden 
beauty. All at once she had the reinstated vision of a 
home. It filled her like a sweet and suffocating fragrance, 
permeating all the passageways of memory. For the first 
time since her husband’s death, she sat in sensitive com¬ 
munion with a sister-spirit; turned soft silks with fingers 
of equality; drank in the sound of sweet and friendly 
accents; raised to her lips the chalice of companionable 
life. 

The room in which they sat, and that these tremulous 
emotions so strangely stirred and tranquillized, w’as spa¬ 
cious. By day, Mrs. Holmroyd imagined, when the sun 
poured its gold through the big bowed window that swelled 
out upon a balcony, it would be luxurious with light. 
That this upper apartment of the Organist’s house as¬ 
pired to the dignity of a drawing-room was shown by the 
prevalence of cushions and insubstantial furniture. The 
conventional white marble of the mantelpiece was hid 
beneath terra cotta hangings, in which Mrs. Holmroyd 
discerned traces of the same hand that worked upon the 
table-centre. An upright pianoforte, posed in what a 


THE ORGANIST 


235 


photographic artist would describe as a three-quarter 
attitude, with its keyboard diagonal to the window, dis¬ 
played its broad back draped in voluminous folds, like 
some spacious dowager in an opera cloak. This garment 
also served the ingenious function of a show-case, photo¬ 
graphs of all sizes being exhibited at all angles, protruding 
from plaits and pockets of silk. Such opulence of drap- 
ery, which a later age has come to hold in holy horror, 
was the last symbol of refinement at the time of Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s visit. It represented the social revolt against 
the gloom and austerity of an earlier Victorian age; the 
transition between one state of error and the next, when 
every innovation seems like an inspired prophet, tread¬ 
ing the thralls of custom underfoot, and summoning 
society to follow to the kingdom of everlasting perfection 
whose gleaming gateway lies at hand. 

At the first trumpet-challenge of true taste the whole 
drawing-room in which Mrs. Holmroyd and the Organist’s 
wife were seated would have fallen prostrate like the walls 
of Jericho before Joshua’s obbligato; but in the days of 
which our history treats it contributed its part to a living 
movement, and these decorative trumperies that filled it 
were emblems of something infinitely greater than them¬ 
selves. The wife of the Organist of St. Saviour’s was a 
domestic pioneer, seeking beauty in unfamiliar and auda¬ 
cious channels; a futurist, as the present age would call 
her, offering her ideals to the contempt of the age that fol¬ 
lows, and even to the protests of the age that was her own. 
The daughter of Councillor Burford would have been 
outraged at much that she found in Mrs. Rencil’s 
drawing-room. She would have contended that all these 
pleats and folds of drapery were fertile harbourers of 
fluff; that with these bright, audacious, perishable colours 
the sunlight must be resisted like a foe. Even Mrs. 
Holmroyd was sensible of a courage that quailed before 


236 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


this unequivocal expression of modernity, and, whilst 
admiring, confessed her own cowardice. She had never 
been herself, a devotee of the work-box and crewel-bag; 
never an innovator, but rather a faithful worshipper 
of the things made sacred by association and dear by love. 
Mrs. Rencil, on the contrary, whilst lavishing every love 
and care upon her home, was animated by the spirit of 
unresting progress. Her ardour transcended all senti¬ 
ment in the prosecution of its ideal. No attachment 
blinded her vision to the superannuation of a piece of 
furniture. The moment it lagged behind the march of 
progress, pensioned off in some oblivious asylum it must 
be, or rejuvenated under flounces. Finding in Mrs. 
Holmroyd a sensitive and sympathetic spirit, the Organ¬ 
ist’s wife submitted her drawing-room to the visitor’s 
judgment with the same ingenuous charm that character¬ 
ized her showing of the centrepiece. She had the rare 
gift of appealing for opinion in terms that seemed to 
lay great store on the value of the taste invoked. “Ho 
tell me how you like this material, Mrs. Holmroyd!” “I 
must show you our new Cosy Corner. We only fitted 
it up before Christmas. I would so love to have your 
suggestions.” 


5 

Mrs. Holmroyd had already noticed the pretentious 
piece of furniture that filled the space between the chimney 
breast and the opposite wall; a conglomoration of cush¬ 
ions and blue-enameled wood-work, terminating in a frieze 
of beaten copper and a cornice expanded into a book 
cupboard with glass doors, topped by a railed gallery 
for the display of indiscriminate vertu such as vases 
with silk ribbons round their necks; French sabots en¬ 
riched with bronze paint, and Dresden figures which Mrs. 


THE ORGANIST 237 

Rencil’s needle had equipped with Gainsborough Hats, 
silken petticoats and knee breeches. 

“It is all our own work,” the Organist’s wife explained, 
with the confiding pride that seems purged of its grosser 
particles and retains only a pardonable and childlike 
pleasure in a task of love joyously accomplished. “My 
husband’s and mine. Of course, we saw the design in 
a catalogue. Arthur—” The friendly confidence im¬ 
plied by her use of the Christian name stirred Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s gratitude as if it had been an unexpected 
gift offered to the soul. It vibrated through all the 
quivering strings of her emotion, “Arthur,” “Arthur,” 
“Arthur,” like the familiar echoes of a bell that chimed 
from a beloved place long quitted. O, how beautiful 
a thing was the music of a husband’s name uttered by 
lips that loved it. She was sure that the Organist’s 
wife loved it. All the things visible in this house were 
blossoms from the tree of love that had its roots deep 
down in the fertile soil of human hearts. This happiness 
of others, though it revived her sorrows and accentuated 
solitude, was as precious food to her. She listened al¬ 
most with eagerness to hear the Organist’s name again. 

“Arthur did all the woodwork and the brass.” 

“Your husband?” Mrs. Holmroyd enquired, astonished 
at this revelation of so unexpected a side to the Organist’s 
activities. “Do you really mean . . . ?” 

Mrs. Rencil smiled with transparent satisfaction for 
the surprise her visitor displayed. 

“Didn’t you know, Mrs. Holmroyd? Of course, it 
wasn’t to be expected you should. My husband is never 
idle for a minute. At times .1 rather fear he overtaxes 
his strength. He has a workshop downstairs (you must 
see it some day) where he does his metal work and wood 
carving in his spare time. It was he made the oak chest 
and the chairs on the landing outside. Perhaps you 


238 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


noticed them. He does all the repairs of the house.” 

“How fortunate you are . . .” Mrs. Holmroyd said 
with emotion. “You ought to be very thankful.” 

The face of the Organist’s wife was lit up with an 
amused, admissive smile. 

“That is what Arthur is always telling me, Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd. He says that a wife who cannot be contented 
with six husbands has no right to be married at all.” 

“Six husbands?” repeated Mrs. Holmroyd, with face 
and voice of consternation. 

“That is only his fun. One of them, he says, is a 
musician. Another is a carpenter. The third is a metal 
worker. The fourth is a painter and paper-hanger. I 
forget just at the moment what the other two are. There 
must be more than six, for there is nothing, Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd, he cannot and does not turn his hand to.” 

“How beautiful,” Mrs. Holmroyd said. She breathed 
the words with the reverence for some priceless work of 
art, paying tribute far less to the skill submitted for 
her admiration than to the picture of domestic happiness 
revealed. “You must be wonderfully happy in your 
married life.” 

“I would not change it . . . for all the money in the 
world,” Mrs. Rencil admitted with unaffected faith. 
“My husband promised, before we were married, to 
take care of me. He has kept his promise. In fact, 
I know he spoils me.—But it is so sweet to be spoiled,” 
she confessed with an attractive smile, “. . . that I dare 
not resist too much, for fear he might take me at my 
word. Not,” she added, “that he ever would. He insists 
on pretending that I am delicate, and treats me some¬ 
times as if I were an invalid. It is lovely to be treated 
so, Mrs. Holmroyd—when really, all the while, one is well 
and strong, and able to enjoy it.” She looked at Mrs. 
Holmroyd with an arch face inviting her visitor’s 


THE ORGANIST 


289 


appreciation, and saw for the first time then that the 
eyes appealed to were shining wet with tears. Instantly 
she curbed her smile, subduing it to the chastened service 
of sympathy. 

“I am afraid you will think me very selfish,” she said 
with a note of trouble in her voice. “My happiness for¬ 
got that your sorrow could hardly share it. I fear I 
have awakened painful memories. . . . Do please for¬ 
give me.” 

“Not painful memories,” the mother of Oswald cor¬ 
rected her. “Very precious memories, Mrs. Rencil. You 
have reminded me of some of the dearest days of my life.” 
She staunched her tears and smiled reassuringly at the 
Organist’s wife through brave and glistening lashes. 
“I think my dear husband must have been very like your 
own. The happiness I shared with him does not die. 
Your happiness seems only to be a reflection of it.” She 
added: “You do not know how much joy and comfort I 
have derived from my visit. If I have wept a little it 
has not been out of the emptiness of sorrow, but the full¬ 
ness of joy. And I could only envy you if I had never 
known the happiness you have.” 

No further reference was made on either side to Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s sorrow. But tears are the universal lan¬ 
guage of their sex, and these two women came nearer 
to an implicit understanding of one another through this 
portal of emotion than had prosaic lips recounted the 
life history of each to each. 

“But my husband does not come,” Mrs. Rencil ex¬ 
claimed giving utterance to a thought that had already 
begun to trouble her visitor. “What can be keeping 
him?” She raised her head, as if her ear detected some 
sound upon the staircase, and vocalized a persuasive 
“Arthur?” on the interval of an octave. In such wise 
Mrs. Holmroyd had been wont to call her husband by 


240 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


name in the happier days. The little touch of nature 
awakened all her kinship. She said to herself: “No 
woman who sings her husband’s Christian name like that, 
but cares for him. It is a happy home. There is love 
in it.” All the same, no voice responded to the invoca¬ 
tion, and the Organist’s wife had already risen with out¬ 
stretched fingers towards the bell when a door slammed 
below. 

It was instantly succeeded by a shrill scream and a 
prodigious scuffle of feet, in which a large pair appeared 
to be in noisy pursuit of a small. The scream came 
nearer, repeating itself at brief intervals with every man¬ 
ifestation of alarm, and burst at last into the drawing¬ 
room, where it materialized into the figure of a frenetic 
little girl with fugitive feet and streaming hair, bearing 
a brass box in her hands, who, apparently without any 
assistance from sight but guided by instinct alone, 
plunged into Mrs. Rencil’s arms crying: “Quick, mother! 
Look what Daddy’s made!” Outside, the larger feet 
appeared to be negotiating endless flights of steps with 
an effect of crescendo as though drawing loudly nearer, 
whilst a voice beyond the door declared: “She has de¬ 
fied her father. She shall have nothing to eat but broken 
chords and diminished sevenths for a fortnight.” With 
which, protesting that his daughter’s disobedience had 
turned him into a wolf, and that he would eat her up 
along with the furniture, the Organist of St. Saviour’s 
came into the room at a rapid rate of progression on 
his hands and knees, emitting noises calculated to dismay 
all evil-doers. He had advanced after this manner to the 
middle of the room when his wife’s laughing protestation, 
“Ar-thur!” caused the wolf in him to hesitate and lift 
its head. “Don’t you know that Mrs. Holmroyd is 
here? What ever will she think!” 

The Organist’s little daughter, safely ensconced be- 


THE ORGANIST 


241 


hind her mother’s skirt, laughed with shrill delight at her 
father’s public discomfiture. Mrs. Rencil and her guest 
laughed too—though the laughter of the latter welled up 
from a deeper source; from that same source, or nearly, 
whence tears of thankfulness and joy derive. As the 
warm sunlight is to those who have known but the life¬ 
less seclusion of the sick-room, so was this intimate warm 
sunlight of family love to Mrs. Holmroyd. Repudiating 
the floor the Organist sprang lightly to his feet. His 
laughter participated frankly in the amusement of the 
situation as he held out to Mrs. Holmroyd the hand that 
so lately had been a lupine and predatory paw. He beg¬ 
ged his visitor’s forgiveness for any alarm he might have 
caused her. He had been quite unaware of her presence 
in the room. But it was very necessary for him to exert 
his authority in that house. “My wife openly disobeys 
me,” he confided. “If I tell her to rest quietly on the sofa, 
she insists on stooping over her needle in the most uncom¬ 
fortable chair. Naturally with such an example it is 
not surprising that I am defied by my daughter, aged 
four.” 

“I am not four,” the culprit protested. “I am seven.” 

“You see how she contradicts me, Mrs. Holmroyd,” 
her father declared. “As a matter of fact, she was seven 
a few weeks ago. But in view of her rebellious conduct 
I have instituted a system of fines. Since she has no 
money in her own right, and all mulctings come out of 
my own pocket, I am compelled to deduct the amount 
from her age. Within the last few days her balance has 
been as low as three years. To-morrow I dread to think 
what her age will be reduced to. As you may believe, it 
is a subject of grave concern to her parents. At this 
rate we see no prospect of her ever growing up. It seems 
probable that she will spend the whole of her life in short 
frocks, and end her days in the cradle.” 


242 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


6 

Already, as we have seen, Mrs. Holmroyd stood on 
complimentary speaking terms with the Organist of St. 
Saviour’s, but the personality he represented for her was 
largely inductive. Such human disposition as she en¬ 
dowed him with reposed on no surer foundations than 
his voice and smile, and she ventured to wonder, in think¬ 
ing of him now and then, whether his identity (if ever it 
should be disclosed) would disappoint the faith invested 
in it. But his voice, his hand, his smile—beatifically 
enlarged through the gold-rimmed lenses—and the sym¬ 
pathetic humour diffused through it, that seemed as if it 
could never be acrid or unkind, but always veiled in its 
own softness like sunlight in May mist—all these re¬ 
assured her she had not erred. 

Nor was she by any means the first to appreciate the 
Organist’s personal charm. This smile, so uninsistent 
and yet so diffusive, and a conversational readiness whose 
whimiscality seemed never at a loss to strip occasion of 
formalism and put the moments at their ease, had contri¬ 
buted perhaps as greatly to his reputation as his musical 
attainments—which few among those who lauded them 
were in the least competent to judge. The members of his 
choir, without exception, swore by Arthur Rencil, and 
would have returned him perilously near the head of any 
poll of the world’s musicians, living or dead, in which their 
suffrages were allowed free play. As the Tax Collector 
remarked sententiously:— 

“A man that’s written Anthems and published Music 
of his own, that’s to be bought publicly to-day in shops, 
is no ordinary musician. We ought to make the most of 
him while we’ve got him. Westminster or St. Paul’s will 
be claiming his services, in my opinion, before long.” 


THE ORGANIST 


243 


For in addition to being a wood-carver, a carpenter, 
a metal-worker, a painter, a paper-hanger, an organist, a 
teacher of the theory and harmony of music, a professor 
of Singing and Voice Production, Arthur Rencil was also 
a composer, wielding a prolific pen. Songs, elementary 
teaching pieces, books of simple voluntaries for amateurs 
and village organists composed in soporific minims very 
comforting to performers endowed with more devotion 
than technique; and anthems, choral services, chants and 
special ceremonial hymns for village choirs and organists 
of the same calibre flowed without ceasing from his pen 
into the religious world. Such compositions, it is true, 
himself assessed at no great value. They were written, 
if truth be told, much less with an eye to fame than to 
the comfort of his wife and home. And yet, though he 
never failed to speak of his own productions with smil¬ 
ing disrespect, he possessed a natural aptitude—bordering 
on genius—for bringing his pretentions before the notice 
of admirers without revealing any of the ugly mechanism 
of vanity. His trumpet was incontestably of silver, and 
not of blatant brass, which, when he blew upon it, emitted 
very pleasant notes much more akin to the breathings of 
modesty than the noisy fanfares of pride. If, for in¬ 
stance, they chanced to be rehearsing one of his anthems 
for any special service at St. Saviour’s he would beseech 
the choir in his soft voice (rendered still softer by the 
kind, persuasive smile) : “Now I want us to do this 
anthem our very best on Sunday. Not because I wrote 
it. Beethoven or Mendelssohn might have done it nearly 
as well. But I’m told it is to be given in no fewer 
than eight parish churches and one Minster. We 
mustn’t let the Minster beat us.” 

Whereupon the Tax Collector, fired with zeal and con¬ 
fidence in his own voice would affirm: 

“If there were twenty-four churches, sir, and all the 


244 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


cathedrals in England put together, it wouldn’t be more 
than the work deserves. If I may venture to express my 
own opinion, Mr. Rencil, (and I make bold to say I voice 
the sentiments of the whole choir) it’s a sublime composi¬ 
tion. That A flat is worth waiting through an evening 
service for. Don’t be frightened of it, sir. Give it out 
boldly on the organ and it won’t be our fault if we don’t 
sing it. We hadn’t need to fear no competition from no 
Minster so long as we’ve got the Composer himself seated 
at the organ.” 

Such was the power of Mr. Rencil’s attractiveness, 
indeed, that all who in the least came under it extended 
this quality of persuasive personal charm into the music 
he played and wrote. There was something irresistibly 
winning about his face, whose expression might have been 
rather one of sadness and melancholy but for the smile 
that perpetually crept through it and warmed all its 
features to a pervading gentleness. Upon Mrs. Holm- 
royd this expression, alike so tender and so bravely smile¬ 
ful, had the emotional effect of sunlight when it rests on 
some familiar scene and makes it poignant. Albeit there 
was little likeness between the two men, the Organist of 
St. Saviour’s recalled her husband. When he looked, or 
moved, or spoke, she caught innumerable glimpses of her 
husband. The acts themselves might differ, but their 
source of animation was the same; the stream of love and 
kindness that like a lance of sunlight pierces the dark 
mass of humanity and makes luminous the elect that 
intercept its warmth and render visible its brightness. 

Whilst Mrs. Holmroyd admired the latest object of the 
Organist’s skill, that the Organist’s little daughter at 
his instigation brought to the visitor’s knees, she saw him 
turn his glance for a moment to Mrs. Rencil and ask in 
a quickened undertone: “How are you feeling now, 
Ethel?” His wife answered lightly: “Quite well, Ar- 


THE ORGANIST 


245 


thur,” and seeking Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes which this brief 
aside had caused to leave the object of their examination 
(a glove box in brass repousse) laughed with gratified ad¬ 
mission. “You see, Mrs. Holmroyd! My husband insists 
on being too anxious about me.” For the first time 
since her husband’s death was Mrs. Holmroyd permitted 
this evening to look upon the sacred picture of a home. 
A flash of divination showed her these two, husband and 
wife, in all their daily intercourse; at their meals, in those 
bright moments snatched between lessons, when each 
called upon the other’s name for sheer companionship 
and love. She heard the sound of their commingled voices 
in gladness and anxiety; she partnered all their precious 
joys and sorrows lost to her. Of truth this visit had 
borne most blessed fruit. Emotion laid hold of her. 
At all costs she must contrive to give Oswald the ad¬ 
vantage of a musical education in such a home. Its in¬ 
fluence might be incalculable. And when politeness had 
sufficiently admired the product of the Organist’s handi¬ 
work, she ventured to disclose the object of her visit. 
It was sympathetically received. The Organist’s wife 
paid an impulsive compliment to Oswald. “What a sweet 
intelligent face your little boy has, Mrs. Holmroyd. I 
often find myself looking at him across the chancel. He 
ought to be musical. . . . Don’t you think so, Arthur?” 

The Organist laughed. 

“If he comes to me for lessons,” he said, with a glance 
at Oswald’s mother, “there can, I think, be no doubt about 
it. All my pupils,” he confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, 
“have talent. Some of them have great talent. In 
fact, I positively refuse to take any pupils who have not 
talent.” But he paid a warm tribute to Oswald in his 
capacity as chorister. “His conduct in the choir is so 
exemplary, Mrs. Holmroyd, that I sometimes find myself 
wondering what sort of a rascal he is in private life.” 


246 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


In the atmosphere of congenial sympathy Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s bosom could not resist the impulse to confide: 

“At first ... it was something of a trouble to me to 
see him in the choir. He seemed so young. If his father 
had lived . . .” she paused for just the fraction of a 
second to steady her emotion, “. . . things would have 
been very different for Oswald. Different for us all.” 

Mr. Rencil acknowledged in a lowered voice, “So I 
am sorry to understand, Mrs. Holmroyd.” 

The Organist’s wife, applying the soft poultice of 
mutual sorrow to the wounded bosom (that old established 
woman’s remedy for hearts bereaved) said with sad under¬ 
standing : 

“My husband lost his father only last year.” And 
encouraged by Mrs. Holmroyd’s expression of reciprocal 
sympathy, added: “Arthur wrote an anthem in me- 
moriam.—What key was it in, Arthur?” 

In a grave voice the Organist told her, “E flat.” 

“E flat. Of course. How stupid of me to forget. 
I always forget keys. It was sung the Sunday after 
Alderman Bankett died. But you would hear it, Mrs. 
Holmroyd.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd had heard it, to her solemn satisfaction, 
and was not surprised to learn that so moving a work 
had been given at the Mirfield Parish Church only the 
Sunday before, and that it was to form one of the test 
anthems for the inter-church choral competitions in May. 
By way of the memorial anthem in E flat they returned, 
more self-possessed, to the subject of Oswald. Mrs. 
Holmroyd failed to realize that she occupied towards the 
Organist and his wife the hopeful place that the aged 
lady and Miss Burford and the straight-legged grand¬ 
daughter had occupied towards her this afternoon, and 
that the Organist’s wife was saying mentally to herself: 
“Another pupil for Arthur! He will be so glad. I hope 


THE ORGANIST 


247 


it comes to something.” Aloud, she paid a warm tribute 
to Mrs. Holmroyd’s wisdom in seeking to give Oswald 
the advantages of a musical education. At the question 
of terms an air of marked obscurity descended over all. 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s finger sought her lip. The Organist’s 
wife stole a glance at her husband as if to say: “What 
do you think, Arthur?” The outcome of the thinking 
appeared, in a gentle voice, to be that “it depended.” 
The Organist’s wife, discreetly interposing before her 
husband’s incautious sympathies should have a chance 
to prejudice the issue, took occasion to acquaint Mrs. 
Holmroyd: 

“Of course, my husband’s regular terms” (she laid a 
lingering stress on the word “regular”) “are three 
guineas.” She turned a brightened glance towards her 
husband for confirmation. “Aren’t they, Arthur?” The 
Organist concurred. Those were the terms he usually 
asked from regular pupils. True, he did not go so far 
as to assert that he always got them. Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
face, politely dubious, fell at the sound of three guineas. 
They were the terms she had feared all along. It was the 
Grammar School over again. Music seemed no cheaper 
than learning. 

“Those, of course . . .” explained the Organist’s 
wife, on whom the descent in tonality of Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
countenance had not been lost, . . are my husband’s 
regular terms.” She seemed to turn now towards a con¬ 
sideration of his irregular terms as though, perhaps, 
some more promising solution of the difficulty might be 
found in this new direction. “Perhaps ... I dare¬ 
say . . . My husband might . . . What do you think, 
Arthur?” 

Arthur thought Mrs. Holmroyd needed not to let the 
question of terms trouble her. “You see Oswald is in 
the choir, Ethel.” “To be sure! how stupid of me,” the 


248 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Organist’s wife exclaimed. “I was quite overlooking the 
choir.—My husband generally makes some slight re¬ 
duction to the members of his choir,” she informed Mrs. 
Holmroyd, whose hopes began to rise again. If Mrs. 
Holmroyd could arrange for her little boy to meet the 
Organist’s convenience in the matter of times— 

“My husband is so busy,” the Organist’s faithful 
spokeswoman threw in. “He has scarcely a minute to 
himself. I don’t know how he manages to fit all his les¬ 
sons in.” 

“If Mrs. Holmroyd’s little boy could do this, and take 
such times as Mr. Rencil had at liberty, he would 
suggest . . . 

“Two guineas and a half, Arthur?” his helpmeet 
prompted. The Organist said he had even thought of 
two guineas in Mrs. Holmroyd’s case. He was sure Os¬ 
wald would give him very little trouble. 

“How does the suggestion strike you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” 
he enquired, and suddenly yielding to the sympathetic 
current passing through them all, he threw aside busi¬ 
ness dissimulation. “Do tell me if I am asking you more 
than you came prepared to give,” he said. Perhaps it 
might have been but Mrs. Holmroyd’s over-sharpened 
fancy that believed his wife turned a quick look in his 
direction as though to recall a too impulsive generosity 
to reason. But if the look were aimed with this intent 
it softened instantly on the Organist’s face, and turned 
back to Mrs. Holmroyd with seeming eagerness to cull the 
first fruits of gratitude from her eyes for this beloved 
husband’s goodness. Nor did Mrs. Holmroyd’s counte¬ 
nance disappoint her. It displayed her grateful sen¬ 
sibility of the Organist’s consideration. “I never ex¬ 
pected ... I scarcely know how to thank you. . . 
she said. 

Two guineas. It was more than she had any right to 


THE ORGANIST 


249 


pay. Whatever terms might have floated vaguely in her 
mind, they certainly were not these. She knew they were 
not these by the impossibility of declining terms that 
came garbed in such generosity and goodness. Had they 
been hard and business-like she might have hesitated. 
But hesitation could not be suffered to insult an offer such 
as this; nor self respect to trade upon so great a kindness. 
The offer was gratefully accepted. Oswald’s musical fate 
was settled. And with respect to times she ventured to 
propose Saturday, if that would be convenient to Mr. 
Rencil. She gave her little school a whole day’s holiday 
then (she told him) and Oswald would be quite free for 
any hour in the course of the day that Mr. Rencil might 
suggest. This reference to the school, that only supreme 
unconsciousness could have dared to make after such 
signal evidences of the Organist’s goodness, appeared to 
take Mrs. Rencil’s understanding by surprise. 

“A school, Mrs. Holmroyd?” she enquired. “Do you 
really mean . . .” 

“Did you not know?” Oswald’s mother asked in mild 
surprise. To her sensitive feeling it seemed as if her 
means of less than livelihood were patent to the world. 

“But I thought ... I was led to understand,” Mrs. 
Rencil said, obviously wrestling with a refractory intel¬ 
ligence, “that you . . . that you made pies, Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd. Somebody told me so. Who was it, Arthur?— 
Of course, it is ridiculous. I might have known.” 

In another house, whose atmosphere of sympathy was 
less assured, Mrs. Holmroyd might have been consumed 
with the fires of her own shame. But here her pride 
walked curiously independent of all deception or pretence. 

“I do make pies, Mrs. Rencil,” she admitted very sim¬ 
ply, and with curious self-possession. “It is ridiculous. 
There seems not the least connection between pies and 
teaching. But after my husband’s death, I scarcely knew 


250 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


what to do. I had my children to think of. They were 
dearer to me than pride.” 

“Oh, forgive me, please!” the Organist’s wife exhorted 
her with a face and gesture of remorse. “How rude and 
thoughtless of me. I did not intend to hurt you, Mrs. 
Holmroyd. I really asked with a view to Alice, Arthur,” 
she said, looking at her husband. “What sort of a school 
is yours, Mrs. Holmroyd? A mixed school?” 

Mrs. Holmroyd confessed to its mixture with misgiving. 

“I do not know,” she said, “whether you would care 
... to let your little daughter come to me.” But her 
heart plucked at the suggestion. “It is perhaps more 
mixed than you would care for. Not all my scholars are 
quite what I could wish. I dare not pick and choose, 
Mrs. Rencil.” 

Mrs. Rencil said, “I quite understand,” with an em¬ 
phasis that seemed to say the sad exigency was not con¬ 
fined to schools alone. But learning by enquiry that 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s own two children drew their manners 
and education from the maternal source, she appeared 
rather to disparage the visitor’s scruple, asking her hus¬ 
band: “What do you think, Arthur?” 

The Organist thought that if Mrs. Holmroyd had no 
hesitation in sending her children to her own school, it 
was an example they might safely follow. 

“I do not know if my wife has confessed it to you,” he 
said, “but she is, I can assure you, a very warm admirer 
of yours. She admires you in more respects than I can 
tell you. She admires the way you come into church, and 
the way you leave it, the way you dress your children 
and teach them to behave. In fact, they are the models 
by which all behaviour is regulated in this house. What 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s children would, or would not do, con¬ 
stitutes the standard by which Alice is (I will not say 


THE ORGANIST 


251 


‘ruled’ but) judged. Of course, my wife and I have fre¬ 
quent quarrels as to who is responsible for Alice’s awful 
disobedience. My wife accuses me of giving her pennies 
and buying obedience by pennyworths at a time. I’ll 
admit there’s some truth in the accusation. Do you ever 
give your children pennies, Mrs. Holmroyd? I hope not. 
It’s really rather fatal. Once upon a time my little 
daughter used to give me quite a lot of excellent behavi¬ 
our for a penny. Now a penny seems to go no way, and 
the quality is dreadful. I think school seems to be the 
only solution of the difficulty.” 

“What are your terms?” his wife enquired. 

Controlling a heart now riotous with hope, Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd mentioned her modest thirty shillings for the term 
of thirteen weeks. The idea took root and grew. Mrs. 
Rencil was indeed a warm admirer of the sweet face and 
gentle bearing of her visitor, and this school, under such 
unexceptional mistress-ship, seemed almost the providen¬ 
tial answer to sundry questions touching her little daugh¬ 
ter’s education that had been table talk for some time past. 
Not only was it decided that the little girl with her 
father’s soft dark eyes, who had intently followed the 
discussion concerning her, (nursing the brass glove box 
all the while) should take her place in Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
class next week; but the Organist said that under the 
circumstances he could not dream of accepting more for 
Oswald’s music than Mrs. Holmroyd asked for Alice’s 
schooling. The two services must be reciprocal. With 
a heart full of thankfulness and hope renewed, Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd took leave. The Organist himself accompanied her 
to the door and let her out into the street whose gas¬ 
lights seemed to have taken on the bright similitude of 
stars, flashing forth messages of radiant gladness. 

“Do come and see my wife again, some time, Mrs. 


252 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Holmroyd,” the Organist urged her. “I know she will 
be so charmed.—And I will expect Oswald at half past 
ten on Saturday.” 

She thanked him very, very much for all his kindness. 
“Yes. At half past ten. It will be a great event for 
Oswald. He shall be punctual.” As she left the house, 
the Deputy—momentarily retarding his footsteps in the 
shadow until the Organist’s door should be clear—made 
a dart forward to intercept it before it closed. 

“Good evening, sir.” 

Mr. Rencil re-opened the door. 

“What ... Is that you, Wembling?” 

“Here is the emery paper, sir,” said Wembling, put¬ 
ting a tubular package into the Organist’s hand. “It is 
the finest they had. And there are the screws.” He 
added a small twisted packet to the first. “Meakins have 
three copies of your Song in the window now, sir. Just 
under the gaslight. They look very well, sir. I saw 
some people standing outside the shop. . . . Shall I go 
straight up into the music-room?” 

“If you like,” said the Organist. “Why?” 

“Why ... You said Thursday evening, sir, I 
understood,” Wembling reminded him. “At half past 
six.” 

“What do you mean by taking me at my word?” Mr. 
Rencil asked. “Your own sense ought to have told you 
that I should be dining with Canon Quexley to-night. If 
not, it would seem that all my musical instruction is 
being wasted.” 

“If it’s in the least inconvenient to you, sir,” the 
Deputy proffered with great obligingness, “I can come 
again another night. Shall I go back and get some prac¬ 
tice, sir?” 

He had his Sunday hat on, and his Sunday tie, for this 
was to have been his singing lesson, and he had some 


THE ORGANIST 


253 


popular nautical songs of the period and a fat copy of 
the Messiah under his arm. 

“No, don’t go back,” said the Organist, drawing him 
forward with a friendly hand. “A night’s rest won’t do 
your voice any harm. In fact, it will give it an added 
timbre. Come in and patch up those voluntaries like a 
good fellow. You know where they are, and the paste 
is in the cupboard. Light the gas and stir up the fire. 
Now I must go and dress.” 


7 

Thus was a new doorway in life thrown wide for Os¬ 
wald. It seemed to open direct upon heaven and yield 
glimpses of the brilliant celestial furniture beyond— 
chiefly upright pianos and gilded organs, radiating 
splendour and such harmonies as fill the firmament when 
the heavenly choristers (that are stars) open their lips 
and sing ecstatically together. The ideal of the dead 
alderman faded somewhat and lost lustre. Gold-rimmed 
spectacles and brown moustaches acquired a palpitating 
significance instead. Some day Oswald was to have both, 
and talk apart with Canons, and be addressed as “Sir” 
by Deputies, and pass mahogany-nosed vergers without 
a tremour. His first memorial to the best of fathers 
should be not a tombstone, but an anthem. It should be 
sung at the Mirfield Parish Church, and form one of the 
test pieces at the inter-church choral competitions. By 
the Tax Collector it should be proclaimed “Sublime 
Music.” If the music were to bear any relation to the 
exalted fervour that conceived it already written and 
published, exalted it must surely be. Its prospective 
creator well nigh snivelled beneath the bed-clothes at the 
sheer beauty of it. He would have drunk even deeper 
of the draught of his own emotion but for fear of the 


254 * 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


sensitivity of the maternal hearing in the room beyond. 

Nor did Oswald stand alone in the intensity of his new 
feelings. The consciousness of his approaching initiation 
to the sacred mysteries of an art extolled so rapturously 
by the Tax Collector, and made illustrious by such names 
as Handel, Rencil, and Sidney Smith, intoxicated the 
home in Spring Bank Gardens. They were as drunk, all 
of them, on the vintage of pure emotion as the verger of 
St. Saviour’s could have made himself for eighteenpence 
at the Nag’s Head; steadier on their feet, it is true, but 
not a whit more reliable in their interpretation of the 
phenomena of life. Because Oswald was going to take his 
first music lesson on Saturday at half-past ten o’clock in 
the forenoon, what reason was there to suppose that the 
economic laws of life were being suspended? What rea¬ 
son was there to regard the shrinkage of Aunt Caroline’s 
financial remains with equanimity restored, and life to 
come with courage? What reason was there to exercise 
the spirit of gigantic gratitude from the Best of Fathers’ 
memory and say: “O, children! Think of him. Never 
forget your dear father.” What reason was there for 
making a sudden hero of Oswald for a feat not even yet 
attempted, and paying him the exaggerated deference for 
an old master? What reason? Why, no reason at all; 
which is the only reason for half the enthusiasms in the 
world, or at least a reason no better than that for which 
(or for the lack of which) the verger shook hands six 
times with the last customer of the Nag’s Head—as 
though half that number should not suffice for any rea¬ 
sonable being—whilst the barman slid the bolts with a 
brutal disregard of feeling behind the closed door; and 
the verger’s vocabulary was suffused with an uplifting 
love of humanity that a few pennyworths’ of kindred 
spirits had expanded in him. Not without good cause 
was Mrs. Holmroyd’s dream disturbed by the apparition 


THE ORGANIST 


255 


of Councillor Burford, bringing his polished counter, 
white shirt-sleeves and knotted apron-strings into her very 
bedroom, his lips so hard compressed as to leave visible no 
mouthway in his beard, with the unspoken charge: 

“Sacrificing good money for music! You are making 
a great mistake, ma’am. A very great mistake. When 
did music ever teach a man business? When did music 
ever take a man into the Council? Point me out the name 
of a single musician in all the list of Mayors. Music is 
unpractical. It’s unreliable. It’s dangerous. It can’t 
add up nor subtract. It can’t judge the weight of a 
ham. It leads nowhere. Once your son gets music into 
his system you’ll have no more control over him. He’ll 
be good for nothing. But you please yourself, ma’am, 
of course. He’s your son, not mine. I don’t want to 
influence you.” 


8 

It was the cleanest of Oswalds that presented himself 
before the Organist’s house on Saturday morning at half¬ 
past ten. The weather being warm and springlike—one 
of those mild January mornings, in fact, that mimics May 
and makes the heart of mankind impatient for Spring— 
he wore neither overcoat nor muffler, but his Saturday 
cuffs were carefully drawn down above his knitted gloves. 
It lacked still some minutes to the appointed time, and 
Oswald—furnished with a brand new empty polished 
leather music case that his mother’s love could not deny 
itself the joy of buying for her son—paced up and down 
before the brass name-plate as impatiently he awaited the 
half hour chiming from St. Gyles’s. The instant the 
quarter jack rang out, taking him by surprise when he 
was still some paces from the door, he ran hurriedly to 
the step and pulled the bell. His last moments at home 


256 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


had been spent before the keyboard by his mother’s side, 
picking up eleventh-hour scraps of music-knowledge for 
the saving of his credit, and he attended the opening of 
the door with a nervous recapitulation of the lines and 
spaces in case he might be questioned on them. First 
space F; second space A; third space . . . The third 
space was an oval space of considerable astonishment to 
find himself confronted all at once by the familiar face of 
a fellow chorister, who greeted Oswald’s thunderstruck 
third space with an apathetic “Hello 1” 

This was one of the senior choristers whose voice poised 
on the verge of breaking, but who, nevertheless, still con¬ 
tinued to attend rehearsals with a regard to quarter day, 
under warning from the Organist against any vocal over¬ 
strain. In lieu of a collar he had his throat wrapped up 
in some red material that might have been part of a 
flannel petticoat. His appearance so little suggested 
music or sustained the dignity of this noble Art, that Os¬ 
wald was conscious of a sudden chill of disillusionment, as 
though over his fire of enthusiasm wet ashes had been 
thrown. Could it be? . . . Why! the chorister had not 
even a music case. And yet, the community of their 
interests was painfully established by the neck-tied fig¬ 
ure’s asking: “What have you come for?”—and being 
told with suitable gravity that Oswald had come for his 
music lesson, responded laconically: “So’ve I.” 

The answer indeed, was so incontrovertible, and dealt 
pride such a flat-hand blow, that Oswald could only stare 
incredulously. And a second disillusionment followed 
closely on the heels of the first as the chorister stepped 
out into the street with the announcement that Oswald 
would get no lesson that morning. 

“There’s another pupil sat waiting of him upstairs, 
now. Mr. Rencil’s out.” 

“Out!” said Oswald. “I was to come at half-past ten.” 


THE ORGANIST 


257 


“Was you,” said the chorister. 

“What am I to do?” asked Oswald, whose diffidence was 
ever ready to appeal to any authority rather than his 
own. 

“Do?” said the chorister. “Go back. That’s what 
I’m doing.” 

Oswald’s heart stopped beating at the mere suggestion 
of such drastic procedure. 

“But Mr. Rencil said half-past ten!” he urged. “I was 
to be punctual.” 

“Then go in,” said the chorister. “If you want. 1 
should.” 

This second advice, for all its obvious conformity to 
Oswald’s apprehension, reassured him no better than the 
first. 

“Go in?” he said blankly. “Where?” 

“Inside,” answered the chorister, jerking his wrist in 
the direction of an appalling flight of stairs, all car¬ 
peted, that Oswald saw with growing concern, beyond his 
shoulder. “You’ve been before, haven’t you?” 

Oswald shook his head. 

“Is this the first time?” 

Oswald said “Yes.” 

“Come along o’ me,” said the chorister with a decision 
that allowed no argument. “I’ll soon show you. You 
don’t need to ring if it’s a lesson. Only if it’s an errand. 
Open the door and go straight in. Like this.” 

He doffed his cap again, stepped into the hall, gave his 
boots two kicks upon the mat and made his way up the 
staircase, Oswald following—without courage to decline 
the aid of such a leader, and yet troubled with the thought 
of what judgment might be pronounced on his temerity. 
They passed up the stairs swiftly and noiselessly; so 
swiftly that Oswald had scarcely time to exercise his 
troubled sight. In a vague and disconcerting way he 


258 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


was aware of doors on all sides of him; of stairs leading 
upward in unending spirals to infinity, but he knew no 
more where he was or how many steps it had taken him 
to come there until he heard the voice of the chorister 
exclaim: “In here.” 

The long naked wrist shot out in front of him and 
turned a knob. A door opened. A voice said, “Go on 
with you.” A hand pushed him peremptorily from be¬ 
hind, and next moment he stood, deserted and unan¬ 
nounced, the prey of his own emotions within the sanctum 
sanctorum, or music-room. 


9 

His entrance coincided exactly with a chord played 
very unevenly upon the pianoforte, which had been pre¬ 
ceded by two other chords widely spaced from each other 
by intervals of stagnation as Oswald and his cicerone had 
mounted the stairs. All these chords, and some others 
unheard, had been produced by a young lady in a black 
frock who sat upon a music-stool before an upright pi¬ 
ano, with her legs dangling above the pedals, and several 
inches short of them; her eyes and nose tilted up to the 
extreme summit of what appeared to be a terrible, steep 
and precipitous page crowded with black and busy notes 
which she gazed at with great fixity of attention. Judg¬ 
ing by the number of notes and the time required to play 
them, the composition on which she was at present en¬ 
gaged would last about eighteen months, allowing a six 
weeks’ holiday at midsummer. Oswald’s abrupt entrance 
seemed no less of a surprise to her than her presence w T as 
to him, for she dropped both wrists (still clutching, how¬ 
ever, with all her out-stretched fingers to the chord last 
played, as though to pin it to the keyboard) and turned 
a startled face in the direction of the door where Oswald 


THE ORGANIST 


259 


stood, holding his cap in one hand and his polished music 
case in the other, speechless and perturbed. 

For the executant, he realized, was the daughter of 
Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew, and granddaughter 
of the defunct Alderman for whom a gigantic urn and 
kerb were now in active preparation at the monumental 
mason’s. And though Oswald still exchanged occasional 
shy glances with this young lady across the perspective 
of her parent’s hall, albeit it was only on the night of 
the Mayor’s party that stress of vanity had broken 
through the reserve between them and caused her to ad¬ 
dress the Sausage Boy, the precise degree of their ac¬ 
quaintanceship constituted a perpetual puzzle to them 
both. For Oswald, this granddaughter of the august 
Alderman assumed an almost symbolic significance in the 
wide realm of his aspirations. Ever since the night of 
the Mayor’s party, in fact, when she did his pride the 
honour of speaking to it, she had come to occupy a senti¬ 
mental place in his inner and most cherished life. When 
it is recorded that in his sacred moments of imagination 
he had even led her to the altar, and that she had wept 
tumultuous widow’s tears over her deceased husband’s 
grave in the cemetery, it may be conceived with what em¬ 
barrassment Oswald now found himself face to face with 
this object of his dreams, conscience-troubled lest any 
part of these guilty imaginings might by some mental 
alchemy escape control and become visible. Besides, seen 
out of her customary environment, Miss Bankett seemed 
curiously changed, and her eye was certainly more alert 
and penetrative than Oswald cared to encounter single 
handed. But, as though she found nothing in the new 
arrival’s appearance to repay further notice, Miss 
Bankett transferred her gaze to the crowded summit of 
the sheer and almost toppling page. By the convulsive 
movement of her lips, wrists and shoulders, Oswald be- 


260 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


lieved another chord was imminent, and regaining some 
of his self-confidence now that the young lady’s back was 
turned to him, awaited its execution with interest. At 
the crucial moment she dropped her wrists again and 
flashed her face round at Oswald, who blushed at being 
discovered with so flagrant a look of expectation and in¬ 
terest in his eyes. 

“Can you play?” the granddaughter of Alderman 
Bankett asked him with a pert enquiring mouth. 

Fearful lest any reply short of negation might plunge 
him into a command to prove ability, Oswald answered: 
“Not yet.” 

“Have you learned three flats?” 

Oswald tendered the same answer. 

“This piece is in three flats. Common Time. Count¬ 
ing four crotchets in a bar. It is my new piece. It is 
by Mr. Rencil. I wish he would come. What time is it?” 

All the while she imparted information or sought it, her 
eyes—hard, grey-green Bankettian eyes—put Oswald 
through a searching examination from his boots to his 
cap, and his cap to the music case, and the music case 
to his clean white collar, chin, mouth, eyes, and forehead, 
and without waiting for any answer to her last question, 
addressed herself once more to the topmost stave of the 
page, and went through all the elaborate and conclusive 
processes as before. This time, however, with a tremen¬ 
dous hardening of her mouth and contracting of her 
brows and stiffening of her forearms and hunching of her 
shoulders, the chord was struck. 

It was wrong. Palpably, inextricably wrong. 

After gazing curiously at her outspread fingers and at 
the page in turn, whilst the chord still vibrated dis¬ 
cordantly in the bowels of the instrument, and as though 
despairing of a reconciliation between factors so con- 


THE ORGANIST 


261 


flictingly a I variance, the young lady directed her atten¬ 
tion towards Oswald again. 

“How long have you been learning music?” 

Oswald answered diplomatically, “Not very lorn? ” 

“A year?” 

“Not yet.” 

I ve been learning nearly three years. I’ve never 
played this piece before. It’s a lot more difficult than 
the last. The last had only one sharp. I don’t think I 
like this one. Do you? I shall ask Mr. Rencil to play 
it for me as soon as he comes. It goes faster than this 
really. A lot faster.” There came a pause and she 
added: “You won’t be bringing us any more pies or 
sausages for a long while. I know. I heard mother tell 
Mary so last night. We’re getting tired of them. Aren’t 
you?” 

All this time the dissonant chord made a protesting 
clamour in the depths of the pianoforte, as though sup¬ 
plicating to be resolved or otherwise put mercifully out of 
misery. The subject of sausages proving somewhat deli¬ 
cate for the son of the Manufacturer, Oswald could only 
respond to it by means of a flush, which Miss Bankett'im¬ 
mediately noted and commented on, saying with the ut¬ 
most self-composure: “You’ve gone all red. Did you 
know?” Oswald’s reply being unintelligible, the young 
lady exclaimed: “O, dear! I wish he’d come. Aren’t 
you tired of waiting? I am,” and displayed half a ten¬ 
dency to tackle the top of the page once more. But the 
cryptic look of the chord already attempted, and prob¬ 
ably the still more forbidding aspect of the chord that 
was to follow, deterred her. Instead, submitting to an 
impulse of coquettish vanity, she suddenly asked him: 
“Do you know this piece?” and rattled audaciously 
through half a dozen bars of a busy rondeau, these half 


262 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


dozen bars constituting all that she was able to play with¬ 
out the book. Oswald, lacking as yet any intimacy with 
the works of the Organist of St. Saviour’s, was in no posi¬ 
tion to answer that this extract just performed for him 
came from the fourth of the second Series of Twelve 
Progressive Pieces for Tiny Players, called “In the 
Swing,” published (with a coloured title page) by Messrs. 
Ashpot and Claypole. Nor indeed, had he so much as the 
time to shake his head, for this mournful admission of 
ignorance was frustrated by no less a personage than the 
Composer himself, who opened the door at this juncture, 
and, rolling up his gloves, sportively flung the ball so 
made at the extended fingers on the keyboard, with the 
exclamation: “Tig!” 

Then, finding the further opening of the door impeded 
by the person of Oswald, whose diffidence forbade him to 
seek escape from the handle that impended in the small 
of his back, he turned the mild surprise of his glasses 
upon the apologetic presence. 

“Oswald, you scamp! What are you doing in my 
music-room at this time of day? Trying to steal my 
pupils from me, are you?” 

Oswald’s lips emitted a penitential murmur, in which 
the words “Mother” and “half-past ten” were distinguish¬ 
able. Miss Bankett, slipping adroitly off the music-stool 
to pick up the Organist’s gloves, cried: 

“Oh! Mr. Rencil, will you play me my new piece?” 

“Half-past ten!” said the Organist, drawing out his 
gold half-hunter and referring to the dial. “But this is 
not half-past ten. This is much more like a quarter to 
eleven.” 

The humour, kindly though it was, rose somewhat above 
the level of Oswald’s immediate modesty. He hung his 
head, deficient of the courage requisite to tell this great 
musician that he had been on the doorstep when St. 


THE ORGANIST 


263 


Gyles’s church clock chimed the half hour. He wondered, 
too, if Mr. Rencil were really displeased to find him in the 
music-room, and whether it was not incumbent on him to 
beg the Organist’s pardon. But his apprehensions were 
quickly allayed by the friendly pressure of the hand that 
fell upon his shoulder. 

“One of us is evidently very late this morning,” Mr. 
Rencil said with an air of great indulgence. “But as I 
happen to be in a very good temper we won’t ask who 
it is.” 

“It’s you,” said Miss Bankett emphatically. “I’ve 
been here since a quarter past ten. And the other boy 
was here too—that funny looking boy with the sore 
throat. He said it was no use waiting—you’d only tell 
him to come again. He said you’d told him to come 
again twice, this week.” 

“Twice?” said the Organist of St. Saviour’s. “Are you 
sure? I’d no idea it was twice. I thought it was three 
times.” He laid his hat upon the writing table by the 
window, littered with music paper, part songs and 
anthems. “Did he take the letter?” 

“What letter?” 

“The letter I meant to give him if he had waited for me 
as he ought to have done.” He brushed the part-songs 
and anthems aside and found the envelope still resting 
where he had laid it. “No! Here it is, the rascal! He 
shall have some harmonic minor scales for this.—Well? 
What about this new piece? I will give you sixpence if 
you can play it from memory.” 

The granddaughter of Alderman Bankett declined his 
challenge, but dismounted from the stool and gave the 
padded seat a vigorous twist with both hands. “ Please , 
Mr. Rencil!” 

Thus supplicated, Mr. Rencil seated himself at the in¬ 
strument, and after reciting the characteristics of the 


264 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


composition to be performed, in most punctilious fashion: 
“Home for the Holidays” composed by Arthur Rencil, 
opus 103, No. 7. In the key of E flat, containing three 
flats B. E. and A (and occasionally F sharp). Common 
Time. Counting four crochets in a bar. Allegro ma non 
troppo—which means play slowly and mind your stops” 
—ran glibly through the music that had cost Miss 
Bankett so much unprofitable labour. As the composi¬ 
tion drew to a close he elaborated it by means of a pro¬ 
tracted coda on a sustained pedal, finally modulating into 
the key of C major for the execution of some miraculous 
glissandi with both hands, to Miss Bankett’s huge delight, 
who exclaimed nevertheless: “That isn’t in the piece. 
I know it isn’t. You’re making it all up. Aren’t you?” 
Not only so, but warming to his genial task the Organist 
of St. Saviour’s let his enraptured auditors hear how the 
composition would sound on a musical box,—the pre¬ 
liminary winding-up of the mechanism being realistically 
suggested by rubbing the finger-nails lightly over the sur¬ 
face of the keys. That Miss Bankett was not altogether 
unacquainted with this high form of musical art was 
evinced by her begging the executant: “Now let it run 
down, so you have to wind it up again.” At which the 
placid tinkling of the music-box manifested signs of un¬ 
steadiness ; the notes dragged, as though the cylinder 
had insufficient strength to overcome the pressure of the 
minute metallic tongues resisting it; hiccoughed and came 
to a standstill. A vigorous re-winding ensued, succeed¬ 
ing which the music leaped into life again, more tinklingly 
mechanical than before. 

Nor did the versatility of the performer stop here, for 
he interpreted the composition after the virtuosic style 
of a French piano, and also in the manner of an itinerant 
German Band of three instruments—saxophone, cornet 
and clarinet. After awhile the clarinet (as Mr. Rencil 


THE ORGANIST 


265 


explained over his shoulder) took off his cap and went 
collecting coppers, thus leaving the composition to the 
mercies of the cornet and saxophone. The cornet, after 
a further while, also doffed his cap and departed in quest 
of coppers, abandoning the morceau to the care of the 
saxophone alone, who held on resolutely with the basses 
until the clarinet’s return, when he ceased playing on the 
saxophone in order to blow through it. Mr. Rencil also, 
at Miss Bankett’s urgent request, played the National 
Anthem in two simultaneous keys, putting this familiar 
hymn perplexingly into the minor, at the same time drop¬ 
ping its tonality by semitones until at last, for lack of 
any further keyboard, it came into collision with the 
bass truss. During the course of this marvellous recital 
the delight which Miss Bankett experienced caused her 
to turn continually towards Oswald, impelled by the in¬ 
stinctive desire to share her own joy and partake of his, 
and Oswald’s assurance (since no speech was demanded of 
it) rose to an incredible degree. Stimulated by these 
wonders of the sublime art—wonders of which he had not 
even dreamed—his bosom expanded. He visioned him¬ 
self retailing all these marvels in turn; to his mother; 
to his sister; to Miss Bankett’s own self; to imaginary 
legions of Canons, vergers, and admiring pupils. He 
felt endowed with a courage that would stick at nothing. 
He could even have answered questions put to him. This 
was an auspicious beginning, indeed. This was some¬ 
thing like learning music. This was, in the highest sense 
of the word, Sublime. 

As the bell of St. Gyles’s boomed the hour of eleven, the 
music room door opened once again, and the smiling maid 
insinuated her head to announce that Miss Bankett’s 
mamma had called for her, and was now seated with Mrs. 
Rencil in the drawing-room. 

This interruption, closely followed by the appearance 


266 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of a gaunt gentleman with high cheek bones and a mous¬ 
tache like a respirator (though shaggier at the edges) 
whose roll of music wrapped in brown paper and tied with 
string proclaimed him a student of the divine art—prob¬ 
ably a bass vocalist, to judge by the protuberance of his 
Adam’s apple—put an effectual stop to further con¬ 
trapuntal exercises. Miss Bankett, suddenly infected 
with market fever and the excitement to go a shopping, 
picked up her hat and mantle and ran to rejoin her wait¬ 
ing parent, sped by genial words of recommendation from 
the Organist, and the promise of a longer lesson next 
week. The gaunt gentleman was taken cordially by the 
hand and welcomed—although, as Mr. Rencil warned him, 
they would have to make the most of the least available 
time this morning, inasmuch as he had shortly to give an 
organ lesson at the church. Oswald, indulgently patted 
on the back, was commended for the lustre of his music 
case, which (said Mr. Rencil) showed how hard he meant 
to work. In addition, the Organist told him to practice 
his scales and to come back on Monday morning at the 
same time, which Oswald undertook to do, saying to him¬ 
self all the while: “But I shall be at school on Monday. 
I can’t come then. Tell him 1” Had it not been for the 
presence of the gaunt gentleman with the natural respir¬ 
ator, who, having unrolled his music and straightened it 
upon his knee, was now beginning to cough in a summary 
and professional manner and to work his Adam’s apple up 
and down in preparation for vocal exercises, and whose 
eye seemed to rest on Oswald in a somewhat menacing 
and unfriendly fashion as though resentful of his pres¬ 
ence—Oswald felt sure he could have found sufficient 
courage to explain his inability to come at the time ap¬ 
pointed. But the eye of the vocalist sealed his lips 
with the weight of a leaden “Begone!” 

As he closed the door, still deeply pondering, he heard 


THE ORGANIST 


267 


his name called after him in Mr. Rencil’s voice. “Per¬ 
haps,” thought Oswald, “he has remembered that I shall 
be at school on Monday morning.” But the Organist 
had remembered no such thing. He had found on his 
writing table the note, addressed to one of his pupils, that 
the red-throated boy should have waited for this morn¬ 
ing. The duty of delivering it was now delegated to 
Oswald, who accepted the charge with pride. Oswald 
knew Mr. Finchley; Oswald was to take the note to him 
at Messrs. Garrod and Wheelright’s Office in Monastery 
Street. He would find Mr. Finchley in the public office 
on the left-hand side of the door, with an office coat on 
and a pen over his ear. If it wasn’t over his ear it would 
be stuck through his mouth. On no account must Os¬ 
wald turn by mistake into the private office on the right- 
hand side, for if he so much as put his head in there 
would be six and eightpence to pay. That Oswald should 
keep out of the clutches of the law was Mr. Rencil’s 
earnest hope. The gentleman with the respirator laughed 
at this. That is to say, the respirator arched its back 
under his nose and became crescent shaped, but instantly 
the valves of his Adam’s apple began to work again, and 
he tried his voice subterraneously on a “Ha!” as though 
actuated by the sudden fear that, in laughing, he had 
lost it. 

“And don’t forget Monday morning,” Mr. Rencil re¬ 
minded Oswald as he took his leave once more. Oswald, 
still telling himself: “But I shall be at school on Mon¬ 
day morning. Doesn’t he know?” acquiesced again. 
Pondering this matter deeply, he walked with exemplary 
politeness down the padded stairs, keeping his eyes from 
wandering and praying that the doors he passed might 
not open to involve him in any further complications be¬ 
fore he reached the street. A brilliant prelude on the 
pianoforte rang out from the music room and arrested 


268 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


his attention. He opened the front door with exceeding 
delicacy and care, to prolong the rapture of these glori¬ 
ous sounds that emanated from the Organist’s hallowed 
fingers, wondering too, whether he might not be rewarded 
with a taste of the quality of the gaunt-faced gentleman’s 
voice. But that hope bore no fruit, for the moment of 
the singing lesson was not yet. These far more glorious 
strains originated from the Organist alone, who played 
to his flattered and enraptured pupil the latest song 
whose proofs sheets had reached him from the London 
publishers that morning. Perhaps, thought Oswald, his 
mother might be willing to release him from the school 
on Monday for such an important matter as a music 
lesson. His conscience troubled him the less because his 
vanities were so vigorous. It is true he had had no op¬ 
portunity to display his clean fingers, or to show Mr. 
Rencil how politely he could sit at the piano. But he 
had been played to by the Organist’s great and very self; 
he had been spoken to by Miss Bankett; Mr. Rencil had 
patted his shoulder. And lo! now he was engaged to 
undertake a most important mission on the Organist’s 
behalf. 

Devotion grows with service. They love best who 
serve the most. Oswald’s loyalty towards the Organist 
was .greater because something had been asked of it. He 
went on his errand irradiated with gratitude and aspira¬ 
tions. 

O! after all this—what a musician he should some 
day be. 


BOOK VII 


THE SUITOR 
1 

A LTHOUGH Mrs. Holmroyd was now become a 
regular attendant at his shop, the weeks waxing 
in light and warmth towards Easter only served 
to establish Councillor Burford’s custom of calling at the 
little home in Spring Bank Gardens from time to time. 
Any day after the lapse of three his footfall might be 
listened for towards teatime, and his broad figure awaited 
between the two posts of the parlour door. The pur¬ 
pose of his visit remained perpetually undefined, and 
seemed in the end to repose so implicitly upon its own 
justification that ultimately the Councillor did not even 
trouble to explain that he had “just called round, 
ma’am . . which served, in earlier days, as his invari¬ 
able substitute for explanation. He developed a com¬ 
fortable sense of liberty to fill the doorway or walk into 
the parlour, (standing always hat in hand with his over¬ 
coat thrown open and his broad shoulders to the mantel¬ 
piece) and watch the group at table as if they were the 
objects of his special interest and conciliar care. His 
eye would dwell on Mrs. Holmroyd’s wrist as it arched 
delicately in pouring out the tea; or on Beryl’s smaller 
hand as, recovering from its first constraint at the Coun¬ 
cillor’s appearance, it tucked away a spoonful of rich red 
home-made j am into her determined and appreciative 
mouth; or on Oswald prudently partaking of the politest 
small pieces of bread and butter in case the Councillor 
might surprise him with a question too direct and too 


270 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


peremptory for a mouth unwisely overfilled. The con¬ 
versation at such times followed a routine as periodic and 
established as the Councillor’s own visit. Enquiry was 
always made in regard to the behaviour of Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s gas. Was that the full pressure, ma’am? It 
seemed to the visitor’s municipal eye to be burning some¬ 
what blue. Some unreasonable burgesses complained that 
the Daneborough gas was dirty, and made a mess of the 
ceiling. He begged strongly to differ with them, ma’am. 
Such people was unpractical and destitute of common 
sense. They didn’t know what they was talking about. 
If they was in the Council, like him, they’d understand 
the difficulties of the Corporation and the benefits con¬ 
ferred upon them. Them that grumbled ought to have a 
private gas company to deal with, and then they’d have 
something to grumble about. The Daneborough gas, 
ma’am, was second to no gas nowhere. It was as clean 
and as pure as gas could be, and as cheap. If people 
didn’t take the trouble to clean their burners, or let 
water get into their pipes, or tampered with the meters, 
they must expect trouble. Water and landlords were 
also themes of his, and it was rare he could supervise the 
little tea-table without gratifying an impulse to identify 
his own groceries. The sugar (excuse him, ma’am) of 
which a sample would not infrequently be taken up for 
critical inspection at the end of the sugar-tongs, was 
proudly confirmed as a specimen of his best granulated 
lump. “A splendid sugar, ma’am. You’ll find it last 
half as long again as the common rubbish some shops 
offer you at a ha’penny cheaper.” The tea, too, rarely 
failed to attract comment, and when Mrs. Holmroyd 
said: “May I not tempt you with a cup of your own 
tea, Mr. Burford?” he never declined but that the hesi¬ 
tations of his hat before he clapped it finally upon his 
head betrayed a struggle. To a family so long un- 


THE SUITOR 


271 


familiar with the presence of an adult member of the male 
sex at its meals, he looked in this intimate conjunction 
an impressive mass of masculinity. His chest and shoul¬ 
ders overshadowed the small table. His elbow, when he 
laid it on the edge of the cloth in attendance on his cup 
and saucer, seemed to assume possession of the board. 
Noise in eating, as Oswald knew, was an offence unpar¬ 
donable; but the Councillor ate and drank, as he spoke 
and acted, with emphasis and authority, and what he did 
(once done) appeared as little questionable in him as un¬ 
pardonable in another. The crossing of his extended legs 
before the fire had, for Oswald, the authority of a text 
of holy writ, and though the spreading of one’s legs to¬ 
wards a comfortable blaze was a habit to be deprecated 
in company, especially before ladies, it seemed in Coun¬ 
cillor Burford’s case to signify something to be accepted 
and bowed down to like a dogma that reason sniffs at 
but faith snaps up and bolts intact. The moment Coun¬ 
cillor Burford dusted the scattered ash from his vest and 
trousers, and smoothed himself with a view to departure, 
saying: “Well, ma’am! But this isn’t getting me any 
nearer home . . .” Oswald hastened behind the visitor’s 
chair with the solicitude of a head waiter, prepared to 
possess himself of the Councillor’s hat and coat. Into 
the latter garment he essayed, manfully, to help the risen 
guest, being nearly swept off his feet by the violence with 
which the burly visitor assumed it; a procedure involving 
almost as much danger for the assistant as the shoeing 
of a horse. 

Contrary to Mrs. Holmroyd’s fears—which, thriving 
on solitude’s too fertile soil, had made her dread the mo¬ 
ment when Oswald’s music lessons must be confessed—the 
Councillor accepted the intelligence with surprising for¬ 
titude. He merely said: “Indeed, ma’am!” as he but¬ 
toned his overcoat. “Are you decided to make a musician 


272 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of him?” It is true this question troubled her, that had 
the effect of trampling (like a rude foot in a flower bed) 
on dreams and aspirations too young and tender to bear 
the weight of such reality. But as the trespasser ap¬ 
peared unconscious of what he had trodden on her polite¬ 
ness drew no attention to the footmark, and strove to 
hide, even from Oswald, the least sign that she had 
noticed it. It was a little early yet, she answered, to 
say w T hat use Oswald would ultimately make of his music. 
Mr. Rencil expressed himself highly pleased with Os¬ 
wald’s progress. 

“Mr. Rencil should know, ma’am,” the Councillor re¬ 
marked. “If he doesn’t, he ought to. Music’s his busi¬ 
ness.” 

But the question was not pursued. The Councillor, 
somewhat to Mrs. Holmroyd’s concern, accepted her 
judgment in this important matter for final. She won¬ 
dered if the facile acquiescence of her visitor proclaimed 
he had lost patience with her, and was resolved to waste 
no more advice on one so incapable of appreciating it. 
Her misgiving grew when two successive visits passed 
without enquiry as to Oswald’s future. Even Oswald, 
for all he feared the point-blank challenge of the Coun¬ 
cillor’s eye, developed consciousness of neglect, and specu¬ 
lated uneasily as to the reason why their guest interro¬ 
gated him no more. 

One evening, after Oswald had helped the Councillor 
into his heavy coat and the Councillor had tried on, 
according to custom, his blunt crowned hat, he turned 
back from the doorway to Mrs. Holmroyd with the re¬ 
mark: 

“You never call to see my daughter, ma’am.” 

The statement was so incontrovertible that Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd, taken by surprise, could only admit it. 

“Why not?” asked the Councillor. “You ought 


THE SUITOR 


273 


to some time. It would be a change for you both.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd, to whom the suggestion had never 
presented itself, pleaded the difficulty of leaving her 
school. “Besides . . .” she said, “I never thought . . . 
Miss Burford has not asked me.” 

“Hasn’t she ma’am?” the Councillor enquired. “I 
understood she had done. If she hasn’t she’s meant to. 
But you know what Annie is. Mention visitors and at 
once the house isn’t fit for ’em. She wouldn’t let no¬ 
body see into it until it’s been cleaned down from top to 
bottom. It’s always being cleaned down from top to 
bottom, and next day—if you believe what she tells you 
—it’s not a ha’porth better for doing. But you don’t 
want to take no notice of her, ma’am. 1 don’t. . . . 
She’ll be writing to you, I fancy, before so long. 
I hope you won’t say No to the invitation when it comes.” 

With that, deciphering the movement of Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s lips and the expression on her face as favourable, 
he turned to the door again and brushed past the attend¬ 
ant Oswald into the open street. They heard his foot¬ 
steps fading rhythmically into space. Always the ab¬ 
straction of so great a presence from their midst seemed, 
at first, to leave the little parlour lonely, and accentuate 
the solitude of their tiny circle. Instinctively they drew 
together after his departure to compensate the void by 
closer demands upon each other’s company. 

2 

The prospective invitation from Miss Burford lagged 
with the same leadenness that the prospective visit had 
done, which it replaced as a topic of enquiry on the 
Councillor’s part when he called on Mrs. Holmroyd, ask¬ 
ing: “Have you heard from my daughter yet, ma’am?” 
and assuring her, “You will do, before long, I know. 


274 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


She’s anxious to write to you. I fancy there’s some 
cleaning going on to-day.” When at last the promised 
letter arrived, which it did (as Mrs. Holmroyd partly 
expected) by the hand of Mrs. Chandler’s granddaughter, 
who knew (and confided to her schoolmistress) precisely 
what was in it, Mrs. Holmroyd behind the gratified sur¬ 
prise assumed to fend the keen eyes probing her, felt the 
resignation attendant on a fear confirmed. With liberty 
to act according to the dictates of her heart, much rather 
would she have declined the invitation tendered in Miss 
Burford’s extra-super handwriting, on the special sta¬ 
tionery employed for ceremonious occasions, exhaling in 
the hand a faintly formal odour between soft soap and 
dried lavender, like some spinstral scent on its dignity. 
But the Councillor, calling that same evening to pro¬ 
pound his question, “Have you heard from my daughter, 
yet?” made refusal impossible. And for her children’s 
sakes she must be careful to sting no susceptibilities, to 
throw away no friends. Nevertheless, standing once more 
before the door of Rockery House, a melancholy feeling 
possessed her, like the trepid expectation that attends the 
answering of a dentist’s bell. The last time (her remi¬ 
niscent sentiment reminded her) that she had stood upon 
this step was on a soft and sunlit day in late November. 
Then her two children had been with her. She missed 
them now. 

The servant-maid who answered to her ring was not 
the one that had admitted her on the occasion of her 
first visit, albeit pertaining obviously to the same species, 
and stamped painfully with the Burford hall-mark; ir¬ 
resolute and anxious-eyed. She and Mrs. Holmroyd 
gazed enquiringly at each other for a space—victims, 
alike, of the paralyzing Burford regime, though neither 
knew it. Acting under evident compulsion and shrink¬ 
ing palpably from the impertinence imposed upon her, the 


THE SUITOR 


275 


maid supplicated Mrs. Holmroyd’s name with as much 
shame as if she had been begging alms. “Mrs. Holmroyd” 
she repeated for her own assurance, and was horrified to 
find that in merely closing the front door behind the guest 
according to the strict method laid down for her, she had 
forgotten it. Not daring to confess so fearful an of¬ 
fence, and invoking the deity’s aid in vain, she improvized 
a substitute for the name forgotten, and announced the 
visitor to the drawing-room as Mrs. Scholes. 

By the death-like silence brooding over the house, and 
in particular beyond the sealed drawing-room door, that 
seemed to guard nothing but seclusion, Mrs. Holmroyd 
had plucked up hope to believe herself the first and 
(preferably) the only guest. But she was quickly un¬ 
deceived. Already the electro-plated kettle simmered dis¬ 
creetly on an occasional table over its lugubrious blue 
flame. The imitation Crown Derby tea-set was displayed 
in mathematical array. The afternoon tea-stands of 
wicker-work stood charged with plates of fragile bread 
and butter, sliced to extinction in the effort to express re¬ 
finement; a primrose coloured Madeira cake, and finger 
biscuits of the sort with which Mrs. Holmroyd’s weekly 
visits to the shop in the High Gate had familiarized her. 
Disposed about these starved emblems of a hospitality un¬ 
natural and ill at ease were seated in varying postures 
of polite constraint some half dozen female figures. Save 
for a little colour in their millinery the assembly might 
have been funereal. One or two of the guests were al¬ 
ready embarrassed with cups and saucers which penalized 
their movements and lent anxiety to their eyes, so that be¬ 
tween what they held and what they sat on they would have 
enjoyed more liberty on a gibbet in a high wind. Still, 
sustained by the gratifying thought that they were par¬ 
takers of the sacrament of fashion, whose rewards like 
those of true worship itself must be purchased by pres- 


276 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ent discomfort with a view to future and not immediate 
enjoyment, they submitted to the ordeal with pious for¬ 
titude; holding their uncomfortable cups as if they had 
been hymnbooks, and uttering their “Really’s” “Dear 
me’s” and “You don’t say so’s” in the restrained tones 
for liturgical responses. 

The announcement of Mrs. Scholes to this solemn as¬ 
semblage furnished an agreeable distraction for the wor¬ 
shippers, in whose eyes a look of curiosity was kindled, 
and over whose lips the name “Scholes” passed in under¬ 
tones of enquiry. Miss Burford, whose dark brows had 
touched each other in a frown of perplexity at the maid’s 
announcement, repeating: “Mrs. Scholes! . . . Scholes! 
I don’t know anybody called ‘Scholes.’ What does she 
want? Is she collecting? Surely you’re not bringing 
her in here ?”—stabbed a glance at the maid that would 
have pierced a half-inch door, on catching sight of her 
visitor. 

“Mrs. Scholes indeed!” she exclaimed in tones of inef¬ 
fable disgust. “You mean Mrs. Holmroyd. Why don’t 
you keep your ears open!” She tried to melt the look of 
acrimony in a hostess-smile of welcome, but it lay undis¬ 
solved beneath dilute graciousness like a crystal of wash¬ 
ing soda. 

“I couldn’t think who in the world she meant, Mrs. 
Holmroyd! Please step forward. (Mrs. Scholes in¬ 
deed!) Do take a seat. Mrs. Holmroyd—Mrs. Bing¬ 
ham. I don’t know if you’ve met Miss Hanson before. 
Mrs. Palethorpe.” She introduced her visitor to all the 
assembled company, which inclined from its chairs with 
a wary eye on its teacups like ladies on horseback, and 
led her to a small occasional seat by the fireplace with 
the assurance that she would find this chair very low and 
very uncomfortable, and Mrs. Holmroyd was not to hesi¬ 
tate to say so. Meanwhile, silent and increasingly crim- 


THE SUITOR 


277 


son, the maid took up a position by Miss Burford’s elbow, 
ready to receive the cups dispensed and transport them 
tremulously to the attendant guests. The preternatural 
politeness of Miss Burford’s voice in its solicitude respect¬ 
ing the tea-tastes of her company was constantly in¬ 
filtrated with undertones of rancour intended for her 
servant, whom she bade sharply to stand further back. 

“Do you want to tilt my elbow when I am pouring out 
the hot water?” 

This running commentary on the maid’s behaviour, con¬ 
ducted in a suppressed and waspish whisper that posed 
as being inaudible to the outraged feelings of her guests, 
was in reality directed to the room at large, which it in¬ 
vited to share Miss Burford’s trials—for, without these, 
indeed, her office as hostess would have been insupport¬ 
able. Every time she raised her eyebrows or bit her un¬ 
derlip, or frowned, with an appealing eye to the company, 
she drew attention from the protested shortcomings to 
her own superiority, and mounted on the maid’s delin¬ 
quencies to a pedestal of injured pride, where she could 
insinuate her own high standard of domestic proficiency 
for admiration. 

Miss Burford’s tongue, in fact, turned invariably to¬ 
wards the kitchen. Other topics she tolerated; they 
seemed as alien to her nature as a new hat or stiff new 
mantle; but this topic boiled in her blood. At sound of 
the word “Servant” she quivered to be let loose upon the 
subject. Her bosom was so distended with matters to 
impart that her ear had scarcely patience to imbibe the 
tepid talk of others on a topic so eminently her own. Let 
but the narrator pause to cough or try to recollect some 
unremembered name, Miss Burford’s lips, unable longer to 
restrain the seething crowd behind them, would instantly 
appropriate the topic in the first person singular—as if 
she were continuing, and not usurping it. Would they 


278 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


believe this? Would they credit that? The maid could 
not even blacklead! Only this morning Miss Burford had 
had to go down on her hands and knees before that very 
grate and do it all over again. 

Having handed round all the cups and saucers with a 
hand so unsteady as to make the crockery chatter like 
teeth, the maid had been dismissed to the kitchen (whither 
Miss Burford, in conversation, immediately followed her). 
But even this grand theme, engrossing though it was, suf¬ 
fered no less than any other from the morbid restlessness 
of Miss Burford’s hospitality, that seemed never con¬ 
tent save when it stopped her guests from drinking, with 
demands for their cups, or choked them over a crumb 
with peremptory alternatives of finger biscuits or Madeira 
cake. No assurance had power to allay her cares; no 
moment was free from the threat of interruption. She 
feared the tea was weak. She feared the tea was strong. 
She feared it was too sweet. “Mrs. Holmroyd! You 
are scarcely touching your tea. It must be quite cold. 
Do let me make you another cup. Don’t eat that biscuit 
if you don’t care for it. Let me give you a scone instead. 
Or some Madeira cake. You’re making a very poor tea.” 

Dropped into the beverage of common talk Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s first few words floated like ice in claret cup, with 
a serene air of detached perfection that seemed to chill 
the medium they swam in. If her dress were simple and 
her manners unpretentious, her tones revealed the quiet 
confidence of a culture too surely founded in itself for 
affectation. When she had spoken the other voices, 
quick to take the standard of her tones as a challenge, 
remained silent for awhile out of desire to avoid immedi¬ 
ate competition. Miss Burford re-formulated in her 
mind each sentence that her new guest uttered, with a 
minute and jealous appreciation of the difference between 


THE SUITOR 


279 


their contrasted speeches, and a growing distrust of her 
own grammar and aspirates. Not only, too, for the 
Councillor’s daughter did Mrs. Holmroyd represent the 
last arbitrament of diction by which Miss Burford’s 
blunter accents stood condemned, but a qualified referee 
of social amenities. Not knowing how much Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd knew of the complex usages of society, Miss Burford 
found herself in the dilemma of striving to propitiate 
standards of whose exactions she was ignorant. She 
watched Mrs. Holmroyd’s holding of her cup and saucer; 
noted the application of her lips to what she drank; the 
fastidious curl of her fourth finger. To the hostess this 
new guest was the enervating unknown quantity. She 
had reduced the social knowledge of her other visitors to 
a decimal; their values were fixed and known. They, too, 
like herself in social matters strove after a draped ideal; 
uncertain as to what, beneath the formal folds, they wor¬ 
shipped. To them, as to her, these afternoon teas—con¬ 
stituting a superfluous and quite uncustomary meal—were 
but vague gropings after grandeur, that the fingers of 
aspiring fashion reached out for and were for ever left 
wondering whether, by any chance, they might have 
touched it unaware. 

But Mrs. Holmroyd was not long in sounding the 
depth and gauging the strength of the nonconformist 
undercurrent that flowed through Miss Burford’s draw¬ 
ing-room. It was uncompromisingly Wesleyan. With 
sabbath habitude Miss Burford and her father, it seemed, 
attended the grim stone chapel whose forbidding frown 
darkened Monastery Street and preached perpetual com- 
mination sermons in stone. Miss Burford taught on 
Sunday in its schools. All Miss Burford’s friends were 
members of the place of worship in Friar’s Gate. Mrs. 
Palethorpe (it transpired) was the Minister’s wife; Mrs. 


280 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Brighouse was the wife of a Wesleyan Councillor lately 
elected to the Chamber. The attitude they displayed to 
all religions outside their own, and particularly to that 
from which their own immediately derived, was one of stig- 
matic disapproval. When Mrs. Holmroyd, directly chal¬ 
lenged, confessed to worshipping at St. Saviour’s, a 
momentary silence fell on the assembled company as if a 
situation of some delicacy had been created by her words. 
Miss Burford broke the silence by remarking that people 
must be allowed to choose their own worship—with a 
significant pause which seemed to say she wondered that 
Church could be anybody’s choice. She also invited Mrs. 
Holmroyd to express her personal opinion of Canon 
Quexley. And when the visitor admitted with a slight 
flush that she had no speaking acquaintance with the Vicar 
of St. Saviour’s, Miss Burford confessed she had always 
found his face very hard and worldly. She agreed that 
this might be owing to his lack of beard, which she found 
unpleasant in a man. “It makes men look,” she said, “so 
bold, in my opinion. It is not natural. It was never 
meant to Be.” Religion was touched on no deeper than 
this—which constituted, perhaps, the deepest point Miss 
Burford ever reached in it. The true comfort of a re¬ 
ligion consisted, for her, in the license it gave to animosi¬ 
ties and the sanctification of intolerance as pious prin¬ 
ciple. Only to mention St. Gyles’s was to make her mouth 
harden instinctively. The glint in her eye at such a mo¬ 
ment betrayed the secret feud that divided Daneborough; 
a division made all the bitterer and more obstinate be¬ 
cause it had come to be coincident with social frontiers. 
The dividing stream ran through the borough like a great 
cloaca, invisible, but charted; parting every social, com¬ 
mercial, municipal and political constituent of the town 
in twain. 


THE SUITOR 


281 


3 

Tea being disposed of and the company disencumbered 
of its cups and saucers, there crept into the drawing¬ 
room after awhile the thin but unmistakable odours of 
the cooking of animal flesh. Miss Burford’s nostrils, be¬ 
ing for some time past expectant of it, were the first to 
single out this subtle savour, which intimated the prepa¬ 
ration of the Councillor’s more substantial meal. Its 
detection was betrayed by an acute intensity of eye whose 
fixed stare sharpened itself to a needle-point piercing 
every other gaze in its quest of infinity. Reclaiming her¬ 
self, with violence, from a concentration of all her facul¬ 
ties threatening to be cataleptic, she cloaked her feelings 
(half disclosed under a great restlessness, in which 
anxiety struggled like some captive animal in a bag) ; 
raised her voice with design to draw attention from the 
tell-tale odour, and turned distracted looks towards the 
clock. The assembled company, having its own teas to 
think about, and grown aware that conversation was be¬ 
ginning now to strain like the last obstructed driblets 
from a teapot, exclaimed: “Surely! That’s never the 
right time!” and rose precipitately to its feet, despite 
Miss Burford’s luke-warm protestations that they were 
to take no notice' of her clock, which (she was magnani¬ 
mous enough to declare) might be a minute forward. 
Nevertheless, as though submitting regretfully to the 
decision of her guests, she rose with alacrity from her 
chair for fear they might be tempted to change their 
minds, and was among the first to stand upon her feet, 
darting glances at the crumpled cushions and the crumbs 
that fell to the carpet from her visitors’ laps in rising. 
Not being of the elect company of Miss Burford’s ac- 


282 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


quaintances, whose spirits seemed volubly to mount now 
that the ordeal of the tea was over, following Miss Bur- 
ford in a loquacious throng to the hall, Mrs. Holmroyd 
tarried slightly behind the rest under feint of fastening 
her gloves. The voices in the hall meanwhile, dropping 
loquacity for confidence, and even descending into whis¬ 
pers as if matters of private consequence were being dis¬ 
cussed, caused her to protract still further the prepara¬ 
tion for departure. Whilst she stood thus, hesitating to 
intrude upon the circle of a conversation so obviously re¬ 
stricted, it was enriched all at once by the addition of a 
deeper voice. She heard Miss Burford’s father telling 
the last of his daughter’s visitors that he was glad to 
see them, ma’am, and that the days were lengthening 
nicely now. The front door closed amid a profusion of 
Good Evenings and “Don’t let it be so long before you 
call and see me again”; the substantial, well-known tread 
crossed the hall to the hat-stand, where the Councillor’s 
blunt-crowned hat seemed to be deposited with an accom¬ 
panying “Ah!” of satisfaction. “Who’s in the drawing¬ 
room?” the Councillor’s voice enquired. “Anybody?” 
Miss Burford’s answer was inaudible. It might have been 
no more than a warning contraction of the lips, or brow, 
or a silence-imposing hand: but that the information had 
been given was attested by the Councillor’s unequivocat¬ 
ing “Indeed!” with which he acknowledged it. “Is she the 
last?” His broad shoulders filled the drawing-room door, 
and his broad hand preceded him into the room with the 
greeting: “Now ma’am. Very happy to see you. I 
hope my daughter’s looked after you and made you prop¬ 
erly at home.” 

Behind the ample figure of her father Miss Burford, 
closely following, seemed reduced of a sudden to a smaller 
and less significant stature; as if some of the importance 
her presence usually expressed had been absorbed into 


THE SUITOR 


283 


the larger presence. Her mouth was tightly closed; she 
held one hand contained within the other, wdth an effect 
of keeping curb upon herself. The eye that paid uneasy 
visits to her father’s face seemed attracted to it by the 
fear of some disclosure or parental indiscretion, as if she 
kept a nervous watch upon his w^ords, conscious of her 
utter impotence to mould or stem them. Mrs. Holmroyd, 
withdrawing her hand from the large grasp in which for 
a moment it had been embedded, thanked the Councillor 
for his kind enquiry, and expressed the very great pleas¬ 
ure this visit had given her. Miss Burford (she said) 
had been indeed most hospitable; most kind. Had the 
two women stood alone, such a tribute would have grati¬ 
fied the Councillor’s daughter into strings of volubility, 
disclaiming any merit for so indifferent a meal. But the 
presence of her parent restrained her lips from speech. 
Only (though Mrs. Holmroyd did not notice it) a look 
of ambiguous disgust showed for a moment in her stead¬ 
fast dark eyes, like a vortex spot betraying deep, swift 
waters, as though to protest scorn of hollow mockeries 
and the insincerity of human life. But the odour from 
the kitchen becoming almost impassioned at this juncture, 
brought a look of new concern into Miss Burford’s face. 

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “What is the girl 
doing! Excuse me Mrs. Holmroyd. I declare I cannot 
leave her for a moment.” With which she retired pre¬ 
cipitately from the room, uttering protesting “Marys” 
as she went. 

“Sit down, ma’am” said the Councillor to Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd, ignoring the domestic tragedy as a thing beneath 
his notice. “Make yourself comfortable. I didn’t come 
in to disturb you.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd, adjusting the fingers of her glove, 
affirmed that she had but that moment risen, and was on 
the point of departure. 


284 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Not on my account, I hope, ma’am,” the Councillor 
urged. “There’s no need for you to hurry away because 
other folks has gone. Annie gets plenty of chance of 
seeing Them. You don’t visit us so often. In fact . . . 
I was thinking. . . . Just take a seat again, ma’am, whilst 
I speak with my daughter for a moment.” 

He was already on his way to the door when Miss Bur- 
ford returned, her face hot from the oven. The damage, 
it seemed, was not irreparable. But thank goodness she’d 
smelled it in time. Her panegyric was interrupted by 
the Councillor’s enquiry: 

“What’s there for tea to-day, Annie?” 

The question caused her eyes to contract as with con¬ 
temptuous indignation for her father’s stupidity. But 
for the presence of the guest she would have cried “There! 
I knew you would do it! I knew you would ask me Some¬ 
thing !” Instead, she answered with acerbity: “It’s 
what you always have on Thursday.” 

“Steak, is it?” interpreted her father. “Well, there’s 
nothing better than steak if it’s tender. Is there . . . 
Can we offer Mrs. Holmroyd some tea, Annie?” 

Reddening and darkening, his daughter said: “But 
Mrs. Holmroyd has been offered some tea! She’s just 
had some. She’s declined to have any more.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd, hastening to relieve the tension and set 
Miss Burford’s anxieties at rest, interpolated—“Oh! 
thank you, thank you, Mr. Burford. Your daughter 
has given me a most excellent tea. I could not possibly 
stay. My children will be expecting me.” 

The Councillor said: “A small tea, I fear, ma’am. 
Not like one of your own. It won’t last you long. You’ll 
want another when you get back, I know.” 

Relieved of the danger, and reading Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
refusal as definite, Miss Burford’s brow recovered some 
degree of its composure—at least so far as the visitor 


THE SUITOR 


285 


was concerned. In reference to her father, judgment 
seemed patently reserved. It was true, she said, that 
they had very little to offer Mrs. Holmroyd. But of 
course ... If Mrs. Holmroyd would really stay, and 
Miss Burford thought for a moment she could persuade 
her . . . Mrs. Holmroyd extended her gloved finger in¬ 
stead, smiled with ineffable gratitude and took her leave. 
The Councillor and his daughter accompanied her to the 
door, that the former opened for her. 

“I’d have walked back with you, ma’am,” he said, “if we 
could have prevailed on you to stay. But you must 
come again some time when Annie’s properly ready for 
you.” 

In the background Miss Burford stood, a witness of her 
parent’s exasperating politeness, her mouth sealed with 
the irate consciousness of a hospitality compromised, 
and obviously resenting the false position into which her 
father’s foolishness had forced her. 

Her smile, maintained by force, forbade Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s tact to look at it again. Mrs. Holmroyd knew 
that the lips, shaped to bid her formality’s farewell, were 
hardening already for expostulation the instant she 
was gone. And indeed the door had no sooner closed 
than Miss Burford turned the full force of her dark 
brows and indignant mouth upon her parent to ex¬ 
claim : 

“A nice idea! Whatever did you want to go and ask 
her to stay to tea for?” 

His voice fended her resentful tones with a blunt im¬ 
patience that seemed to warn her his authority was in 
no mood to be questioned. 

“Why shouldn’t I? Is a man accountable to his own 
daughter for everything he says or does in his own house?” 

“You know the Dining-room is all upset.” 

“All upset is it? It oughtn’t to be all upset. Other 


286 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


people’s dining-rooms aren’t all upset. Where are we 
having our tea?” 

“In the dining-room, of course.” 

“In the dining-room? Why couldn’t Mrs. Holmroyd 
have had tea there and all? If the room’s fit for me to 
sit in it ought to be fit for anybody.” 

“You!” said his daughter with unmitigated scorn. 
“You’re a man. You never see anything. You haven’t 
eyes to tell you whether a room’s clean or dirty. I can 
clean it a hundred times without you ever knowing the 
difference.” 

“Clean!” the Councillor retorted. “It’s clean, clean, 
clean, and still we’re never clean enough. We’re cleaning 
every day of our lives, and yet we’re no nearer being fit 
for decent folks to come and look at us than if we’d never 
started. Here it’s a good couple of months since I first 
told you to write and ask Mrs. Holmroyd to call on 
you . . .” 

“Why 1 should be asked to entertain your lady friends 
I really don’t know,” Miss Burford protested tartly. 
“Mrs. Holmroyd is no particular friend of mine that I’m 
aware of. Surely to goodness I’ve enough visitors with¬ 
out her.” 

“And supposing even it was a gentleman friend,” her 
father argued. “What would you say then? What do 
you always say? You’d say he trod dirt all over your 
carpets, and made the whole place smell of stale tobacco, 
and that it was not a bit of good you trying to keep the 
house clean. I tell you,” said the Councillor, without 
raising his voice, but speaking in tones of remonstrant 
sincerity, “there’s not a bit of comfort in the house. It 
might be anybody’s house but mine. I can’t smoke in it. 

I can’t have my friends in it. I’m sick of it, Annie. 
Sick of it.” 

“Thank you!” said Miss Burford in a voice of suf- 


THE SUITOR 


287 


focated injury. “Now I know what I’m thought of. 
That’s all the thanks I get—working to the bone to try 
and please you.” 

“Working to the bone pleases no man,” her father told 
her. “It doesn’t please me, and I’ve told you so scores of 
times. I don’t want you working to the bone. I want 
comfort, and the more you work the less I get of it.” 

“And you’d be the first to complain,” his daughter 
flung at him, “if I took you at your word, and let the 
place go dirty.” 

“You’ve just said,” the Councillor reminded her, “that 
I haven’t eyes to see whether it’s dirty or clean. You 
can’t have it both ways.” 

“There’s no pleasing you,” his daughter cried. “Here 
I’ve been slaving all day to get ready for Somebody I 
scarcely know, and when she comes and has her tea you’ve 
no more sense than to go and ask her a second time, as 
if I hadn’t offered her enough to eat. It’s ridiculous. 
It’s making everybody a laughing stock. All the best 
knives and forks locked up, and only the old table-cloth 
out, and the silk table-centre folded away upstairs, and 
the cream jugs in the drawing-room. . . .” 

“Forks and nonsense! Who wants your best forks and 
fal de lals?” her father said contemptuously. “Not me. 
Not Mrs. Holmroyd. Not you, even, judging by the 
number of times you ever make use of ’em.” 

They were in the drawing-room amid the remnants of 
the late social gathering. As Miss Burford carried on 
her part of the controversy, sullen faced and heated, she 
passed angrily from chair to chair, putting them rudely 
to rights as if they had been Sunday School scholars, 
cuffing a chair here, and a chair there; shaking cushions 
with vexation; stooping to remove crumbs; scanning the 
carpet for traces of shoe-dirt, scooping up imaginary 
soil and debris with the brass shovel and committing them 


288 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to the fire with an ostentatious “pfff!” of repulsion, that 
the Councillor might see what toil the entertaining of 
his guests entailed, and how interminable were the strug¬ 
gles and tribulations of housekeeping. 

“Mrs. Holmroyd’s house is no great credit to her,” 
she threw at him. “I have never seen her tea-table. 
You seem to know more about that than me.” 

The Councillor, standing before the fireplace, dropped 
a curt: “That’ll do. Let’s leave Mrs. Holmroyd alone 
if we can’t be civil about her.” 

“It’s you that can’t let Mrs. Holmroyd alone!” Miss 
Burford said. “Not me. It was you that made me ask 
her.” 

“To be sure I did,” the Councillor acknowledged. “I 
thought she was a lady you might be glad to know. A 
lady whose manners you might copy with advantage.” 

“Thank you!” said his daughter with a dessicated 
mouth, like one of her father’s own dried fruits. “I’m 
too old to be taught my manners by Mrs. Holmroyd.” 

“It seems so,” said the Councillor tersely. “Is tea 
ready ?” 

For a moment Miss Burford flushed up at her father’s 
peremptory closure, as if disposed to challenge this 
abrupt suppression of her wrongs, but one look at his 
face caused her to accept the issue with a voice and 
countenance of injury. 

“It’s in the oven. You’re home very early.” 

“I’m ready as soon as tea is,” the Councillor said. “I 
want to get back to the shop. There’s a Council meeting 
this evening.” 

He quitted the drawing-room, leaving his daughter en¬ 
gaged on the task of scrutinizing the contents of the cups 
closely as she did so, to assess by the quantity of sugar 
undissolved and the vestiges of tea, to what extent her 
catering had been appreciated. Into Mrs. Holmroyd’s 


THE SUITOR 


289 


cup she looked with a curl of the lip almost contemptuous, 
as if the tea-leaves visible betrayed a nature sinister and 
dubious. 

“Pshaw!” she said to herself at last. “I don’t believe 
it. He wouldn’t be such a fool.” 

4 

One result of Mrs. Holmroyd’s ill-fated visit to the 
Councillor’s house was that both the Councillor and his 
daughter avoided all further mention of her name. 

Its obstinate suppression marked the continuance of 
their feud. Neither would capitulate by uttering it. 
Nothing seemed farther from their lips than the name 
of Holmroyd; nothing showed less remote from their eyes. 
The w r ord perpetually floated in the table-space between 
them, like some disquieting spectre whose very sustenance 
seemed their own silence. Out of this silence, heaped up 
with the indignations that grow to greater stature for be¬ 
ing unspoken, their misunderstanding mounted. The 
Councillor in his shop and Miss Burford in her kitchen 
assiduously raised its walls and strengthened its obstinate 
buttresses. The moment she heard her father’s footstep 
in the hall Miss Burford darkened her visage to the for¬ 
bidding shade at which he had seen it last. She kept a 
countenance of injury in stock for his special edification, 
which—each time she came into his presence, or he into 
hers—she instantly assumed. One look at his daughter’s 
face served to harden the Councillor’s own. Each as¬ 
sumed the character respective, and met like masked ad¬ 
versaries in a duel of obstinacy. 

Petty quarrels between father and daughter, issuing 
out of the clash of idiosyncracies too closely compacted, 
were not unknown, though usually they proved of short 
duration. But the feud between them now was of a dif- 


290 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ferent constitution, and each knew it. It could not be 
reduced to a word; a hundred words could not compose 
it. They had fought on one pretext, but the real object 
of their fighting lay undivulged. They had quarrelled 
and used woundful words, and crossed hard arguments, 
and yet the substance of their grievance remained intact. 
Each nurtured concealment as well as injury, and a 
breach upon dissimulated grounds is hard to heal. 

After this fashion the chief part of a week went by. 
Only essential matters were discussed, and those but 
briefly. Meals lasted no longer than the time it took to 
eat them. With each last mouthful the Councillor drew 
forth his big gold watch, glanced at its dial, and with this 
mute reference to the flight of time and calls of business, 
rose straightway from his place. Not to be outdone, his 
daughter rose as promptly and transferred the cruet to 
the sideboard. If their lips were on speaking terms their 
eyes were strangers. Such looks as passed between them 
were accidental, or on the daughter’s part darkly clan¬ 
destine. It angered her to find with what complacency 
her father carried on this conflict of dissimulation on her 
own lines. Armed with a great shield of masculine in¬ 
difference that seemed to hide his daughter from his sight, 
he paid no more attention to her paltry moods than if 
they had been small-print insertions in the obituary 
column. What her eyes sought to hide or glittered to ex¬ 
press, to him alike made one. He occupied a large and 
comfortable oblivion, in which, to her alternate wrath and 
resignation, she ceased to be. 

Unalterably on his side, inconstantly on hers, the divi¬ 
sion deepened. What had been but a trickle of pent-up 
passion on the night of her historic tea-party became, 
after some days, a swollen stream of dark misunderstand¬ 
ing, swift and (as it seemed) unfordable. Flinging the 
weapon of anger finally aside as a thing powerless to 


THE SUITOR 


291 


reach or harm him, she gnawed the crust of martyrdom 
instead; posing—if but he would have looked at her—as 
the wronged and injured daughter. And to heighten the 
enormity of his disregard of her she cleaned his home more 
recklessly than ever, trying—with that perversity of her 
sex that drives male logic to desperation, and renders 
even prelates profane—to bring him to subjection by the 
very methods he found the most detestable. She bore her 
martyrdom abroad. She took it visiting with her. The 
grievance, condensing from its first nebula commenced at 
last to solidify into a shape; to find a definite expression 
before her friends. The mother of Oswald, by Miss Bur- 
ford, was designated: “That woman,” or “You know 
who I mean.” 

Meanwhile, if the Councillor talked little,—so little, 
indeed, that not one word of this domestic difference ever 
crossed his lips—he thought no less than his daughter; 
prosecuting his own path of indefatigable reflection. The 
episode of the tea-party, disclosing his daughter’s latent 
antagonism to Mrs. Holmroyd had brought him up 
abruptly on his heel. It confronted him with the un¬ 
timely necessity to interrogate his own mind; to define 
what (for his own immediate comfort) he had been hop¬ 
ing to preserve indefinite. In this state of uncertainty 
he shunned the house in Spring Bank Gardens under pre¬ 
text of a pressure of affairs that he tried (for justifica¬ 
tion’s sake) to impose on his own credulity. When he 
drew his watch from his waistcoat pocket after meals, 
and quitted the table as if Time summoned him, he did 
so to escape more than the discomfort of his daughter’s 
company. From her he fled not only, but from himself. 
He tried to temporize with his own thoughts, anxious for 
any basis to believe that his daughter’s jealousies had 
played her false, and that her spitefulness had misjudged 
him. He had proceeded, throughout, so circumspectly 


292 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


that it came upon him as a shock to find how far her 
woman’s intuition had outstripped his pedestrian common- 
sense, taking short cuts to forestall him on the road he 
trod with such immeasurable prudence. To have one’s 
own intentions read, before they are half formulated is 
humiliating to the broad mind reposed in the sense of its 
incontestable security. He had supposed that purpose 
was possessed of ample space and time to work in, subject 
to no external pressure, and limited by nothing more ur¬ 
gent than his own slow-moving will. And all at once he 
found the issue shrunk to the dimensions of a hand, with 
scarce turning space for a mind indulged so long with 
delusive belief in its own liberty. 

So, not knowing yet what his ultimate course of action 
was to be, he resolved meanwhile to take no step to 
bridge the difference. This widening antagonism (he 
shrewdly thought) might serve his purpose, after all, far 
better than any reconciliation. If he took any extreme 
step, who needed to be surprised? His daughter had no¬ 
body but herself to blame. 

Not that he minimized the gravity of the step con¬ 
templated. A widow with encumbrance might give pause 
to admirers far less practical than Councillor Burford. 
But his admiration for the mother of Oswald and his con¬ 
fidence in her womanly qualities outbalanced prudence. 
And despite his avowed contempt for education, and his 
intolerance of unprofitable culture with which he justified 
his educational deficiencies and scorned, in self-defence, 
those superior attainments that took levy of his limita¬ 
tions more contemptuously in return, his heart was well 
acquainted with the secret bitterness that comes of the 
knowledge of a lack of learning. If, out of a dogged de¬ 
termination to hide his weakness from the world and 
justify deficiencies by trying to show them conscious 
and deliberate, he lauded the wisdom of the father that had 


THE SUITOR 


293 


preserved him from the ills of education, he felt the need 
of it with each day of advancement in his business 
and the Council Chamber. Little did Oswald imagine that 
there were moments when his politeness pricked their 
burly visitor’s pride like a fine needle, causing him an 
exquisite regret for opportunities irrevocably lost. 

Now, by means of marriage he might possess himself 
of education in the person of his wife. Looking at her 
as she sat at table, his admiration constantly assured 
him: “What a Mayoress she would make! What a wife 
for a Councillor!” He compared her with the wives of 
his acquaintances; contrasted her soft and cultured 
speech with theirs; took pride in her complete yet unin- 
sistent womanhood, as for a thing acquired already, 
whose possession exalted ownership. Such a helpmeet 
during his mayoral term of office would prove invaluable, 
reflecting lustre on official prestige. He wondered her 
widowhood had not been earlier assailed, and his silent 
courtship entered that inevitable phase when he began to 
suspect each passing week of danger. Often, when he 
called at Mrs. Holmroyd’s house, “just to look in, 
ma’am . . .” the true purpose of his visit was the need 
to reassure himself that no change had compromised the 
situation; that she was, as he had left her, solitary and 
unsought. The chief deterrent was her children. Not 
without an interest deeper than Mrs. Holmroyd or her 
son divined did he concern himself with Oswald’s future, 
seeking (for his own guidance) to appraise the mother’s 
aspirations for her child. Her attachment to her chil¬ 
dren, he had the wit to know, must not be suffered to sus¬ 
pect itself in jeopardy. This quality in her, at least, was 
quite unfeigned. Her other qualities, for the very reason 
that they moved him to admire, caused him to doubt. In 
invoking the aid of his daughter to introduce Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd into his house, he believed that circumspection had 


294 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


succeeded in deceiving both. Once their intimacy was es¬ 
tablished he would (he felt) have better, closer oppor¬ 
tunity to study Mrs. Holmroyd, supplementing his own 
imperfect vision with his daughter’s keener eyes. Now 
he knew that her inexplicable delays in asking Mrs. 
Holmroyd to the house had formed a part of policy, and 
that her eyes had seen much deeper than he deemed. Cir¬ 
cumspection, then, was a failure. Further to practise it 
would be futile. Only two courses now lay open to him; 
the first, to rebut his daughter’s insinuations; the second, 
to ignore them. For the time being he chose the second. 
Above all he deemed it inexpedient to come to close quar¬ 
ters with his daughter on a point where his own opinion 
needed time for formulation. Until he knew his own mind 
he must avoid hers. 

5 

In his domestic life no less than his civic or commercial 
the Councillor had been—before his feet began to deviate 
to the house in Spring Bank Gardens—the most regular of 
men. The main divisions of the day and night might by 
his goings and comings be measured with exactitude. 
Within his house this punctuality found an admirable co¬ 
adjutor in Miss Burford, whose exactitude stripped 
Time of none of those terrors with which poets and im¬ 
aginists have endowed him. On the contrary, she devised 
new rules and furnished him with new decrees to reinforce 
his despotism. Tables were set and tables were cleared 
with the ruthless precision of clockwork. If the Coun¬ 
cillor dared to return by a few minutes late or early, it 
was only at the risk of his daughter’s stern displeasure. 
To be late was a crime involving the inevitable ruination 
of the meal. No power of earth or heaven could avail 


THE SUITOR 295 

to save it. Ruined it must be. Ruined it should be. 
Ruined it invariably was. 

To come home earlier than expected, on the Council¬ 
lor’s part, was a crime scarcely less abhorrent. The 
sound of her father’s footstep, anticipating scheduled 
time, drew Miss Burford’s visage from the oven with a 
look of blazing consternation: “What’s that? Never 
the master! At this time?” She met him with a face 
like the dial of a barometer when it affirms “Stormy.” 
That the Councillor expressed himself in no hurry ex- 
tentuated his offence not at all. Miss Burford knew bet¬ 
ter than that. And, to demonstrate the consequences at¬ 
tendant on parental thoughtlessness, Miss Burford would 
set all the domestic machinery in most violent commotion. 
The maid would be dispatched on a dozen distracting er¬ 
rands to the dining-room, and be as peremptorily recalled 
to the kitchen for the execution of some forgotten task 
that her mistress had completed in the meantime, and 
was now become but a text for reproaches. Cooking was 
recklessly accelerated, and the oven-odours forced to such 
an intensive pitch that they fled like refugees to every 
quarter of the house, protesting the woes and wrongs of 
their oppressed race. The maid spun wildly in the midst 
of them, disturbing their acridity with her petticoats as 
if she were a draught incarnate; shutting doors to keep 
the smell of cooking in, and opening windows to let it out, 
and dropping breathless “Yes’ms” and “no’ms” and 
“what’ms” on all sides of her along with loose hairpins. 
Being an unimaginative man, the Councillor was merci¬ 
fully spared those rackings of conscience that might have 
tortured less complacent parents, and merely character¬ 
ized these demonstrations as “Annie’s way,” deploring 
their consequences more for her sake than his own. He 
ate with gusto, despite his daughter’s flurried face, re- 


296 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


fusing to let his own discomfort be constrained by hers, 
or any argument conflict with food. 

On the next Saturday but one after his daughter’s 
party, he showed the completeness of his emancipation 
from all domestic control by making no return for tea. 
The offence was unprecedented. The kettle whistled 
loudly on the hob; a fleshy haddock, steaming in milky 
juice, wasted its savours on a deepening void. Indigna¬ 
tion withdrew from any intercourse with vulgar words, 
and occupied unspeakable remoteness. The maid and 
haddock communed in the kitchen. Miss Burford sat in 
awful dudgeon in the dining-room. Seven o’clock struck 
and brought no sign of him they waited for. The had¬ 
dock, giving up all hope, sank its voice to a whisper. 
The maid’s face, through continuous application to the 
kitchen clock, seemed to reflect its blankness. 

“You can clear away,” Miss Burford ordered her. 

“Clear away?” the maid repeated, in tones of stupour. 

“You heard what I said,” Miss Burford told her. 

“Shall I leave the cloth on’m?” the maid enquired, 
“against master happens to come back?” 

“Leave nothing,” her mistress ordered her. 

She did, without further question, as commanded. She 
left nothing. The kettle went upon its hook. The had¬ 
dock, by this time scarcely warmer than a human hand, 
was transferred to the larder. Miss Burford’s face dis¬ 
couraged looks and forbade enquiry. It was incredible 
the alteration wrought in a house of metronomic custom 
by the absence of its master. 

A quarter of an hour might have elapsed when the 
dreadful silence of domestic speculation was broken by 
a sudden ring at the front door bell. It formed part of 
Miss Burford’s principle to be inordinately startled by 
every unexpected ring for which her mind could furnish 
no immediate explanation. On such an evening as this it 


THE SUITOR 


297 


was certainly not to be expected that her anxiety could 
condescend to wait until the significance of the ring 
should be brought back to her at second hand, garbled by 
a servant’s lips. She therefore followed the domestic 
skirts as far as the passage corner leading to the hall 
and heard in the stillness that succeeded the opening of 
the front door a voice articulate a message carefully 
rehearsed. 

“Please! . . . Mr. Burford wishes to let Miss Burford 
know . . 

She knew the voice. She knew the fashion of the 
message; the manner of delivery. Trembling with indig¬ 
nation violently suppressed, she left her point of vantage 
so far as to gain sight of the maid’s white apron-bands 
and the dim figure half obliterated on the doorstep be¬ 
yond, uttering the sharp word: 

“Stop!” 

The maid, startled into an audible expression of sur¬ 
prise, fell back from the door, turning a vacuous face in 
the direction of her mistress. 

“Who is it?” Miss Burford demanded. “W r ho is that 
speaking ?” 

The servant said: “It’s the Sausage Boy’m. With a 
message from Master. Master wishes to let you 
know ...” 

Her mistress suffered her to say no more. “Tell the 
boy to take his message to the back door,” she ordered, 
in tones vibrating with anger. “I will not have errand- 
boys ringing the front bell. Do you hear?” 

The maid, whose chin had dropped to her brooch under 
the vehemence of this exhortation, turned to the space 
in front of her and re-echoed Miss Burford’s words with 
a feebleness that confessed itself utterly overcome with 
the force of them. 

“You’ve got to go round to back door,” she told the 


298 THE TREBLE CLEF 

messenger. “Missus says you aren’t to ring front door 
bell.” 

A period of uncertainty seemed for a while to hover 
on both sides of the hall step, and was still hovering when 
the front door (very dubiously) closed at last without 
a sound. 

“I will not have,” Miss Burford reiterated when the 
maid, returning from her mission, faced her. ... “I will 
not have messages left by errand boys at the front door. 
I have repeatedly told you. You seem to take not the 
least notice of what I say. What is the back door for? 
Go and open it and tell him to deliver his message 
properly.” 

The maid, still floundering in depths of wonder, betook 
herself to the appropriate door for errand boys, followed 
by Miss Burford, whose lips showed very hard, compressed 
and pale. 

“Well?” she demanded after awhile, for the back door 
was now thrown open, and no murmur of any message, 
subdued by the deliverer’s consciousness of shame, as yet 
came to her ears. “What is it? What does the boy say 
for himself this time?” 

“He’s not saying nothing’m,” the maid replied. “He 
isn’t there.” 

“Isn’t there!” Miss Burford cried, incredulous. 
“What do you mean? Isn’t there? He must be there. 
Where is he?” 

“I don’t see him nowheres now’m,” the maid said after 
a brief reconnaissance. 

“Don’t see him!” repeated her mistress. “But surely 
to goodness ... You heard what I ordered you. Go 
round to the front at once. Perhaps he’s stood there 
yet.” 

The maid sped round to the front of the house by the 
garden path. Miss Burford, not less agitated, hastened 


THE SUITOR 


299 


back to the hall and flung open the front door with her 
own hand. The light from the hall lamp fell only on the 
maid’s white apron, cap and baffled face, advancing at 
the same moment to meet it. 

“Well?” Miss Burford demanded with the acuity of con¬ 
cern. “Where is he?” 

“I don’t know’m,” the girl answered, breathing heavily, 
in part as a result of recent haste, and in part as a sa¬ 
crificial offering of breath to propitiate the irate Power 
awaiting her; knowing it to be her recognized and 
bounden duty to take the blame for all sins committed in 
this domestic temple. “He’s not in garden. I’ve been 
as far as gate. He’s not outside. He must be gone.” 

6 

Yes. He was gone. The maid had read the scroll of 
fate aright. The Sausage Boy was gone. 

But why had he gone? With what intention had he 
gone? By whose authority had he gone? 

Proud with the bearership of this important tidings, 
and knowing nothing of the tremendous significance con¬ 
tained in it, he had paused for a while before the Burford 
house and rehearsed his message to the garden gate. The 
garden gate having pronounced upon it favourably, he 
took it next to the front door, repeating it in turn to the 
starred and tinted glass, and his confidence now being 
high he prepared to recite it before the maid with no small 
pleasure in his own performance. To such extent as he 
was suffered to proceed, in fact, he had complimented 
himself not a little on the execution of his task, and his 
confusion may therefore be imagined when the voice of 
Miss Burford abruptly broke him off in the middle of it 
and he heard himself commanded ignominiously to the 
back door. If the sky, with all the stars, had fallen flat 


300 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


upon his luckless head, he could not have been more ut¬ 
terly confounded. Hitherto Miss Burford’s treatment of 
him never failed in a certain quality of indulgence. 
Nothing, to be sure, could overcome the native hardness 
of her eyes and mouth, the piercing look; the sharp-edged 
tone. Rarely, however, had he rung before but that (the 
door being opened) he heard her voice behind the maid 
enquiring: “Who’s that? Is it the Sausages?” And 
she had asked after his mother, and how his sister did, 
and once (in a spasm of generosity) had given him an 
embarrassing finger biscuit that turned all to crumbs in 
his pocket through much handling on the way home. 

At first, therefore, he could not believe his ears. 
Speechless he stared into the hall, striving by looks 
alone to assert identity. His eyes reached Miss Bur- 
ford’s eyes, that spurned them for all she realized whose 
eyes they were—with a severity he had never observed 
upon her face before. He heard the words she uttered 
mumbled over to him by the servant-maid, and all at once 
the only thing in front of him was the cut-glass asterisks 
and tinted radiations of the front door, distorting and 
multiplying the grotesque movements of the maid’s white 
cap and apron behind it. 

“Tell the Boy to take his message to the back door. 
... I will not have errand boys ringing the front door 
bell.” 

The words resounded through the awful crypt of ig¬ 
nominy. “Errand Boy. . . . Errand Boy!” She had 
said it. She had meant it. The words were for him, for 
Oswald Holmroyd; the son of the best of fathers. 

And all at once, infinitely greater than the shame im¬ 
posed on him, a fierce, hot, devouring pride rose out of 
the miry depths of his outraged self, and filled him with 
such an indignation as he had never known before. He 
was no Errand Boy. He was a Gentleman. Gentlemen 


THE SUITOR 301 

did not knock at back doors for anybody. No! Not for 
Anybody. 

And without a moment’s hesitation he turned him 
round, marched down the garden path and reached the 
road—making very sure to close the gate punctiliously 
behind him to show how true a Gentleman he was. An 
errand boy would have taken pains to leave it.open. He 
heard sounds about the house as though some errand boy 
were being sought and called for, but he paid them no 
heed. The night was dark, yet a great and blinding 
brightness led him onward, like a star. 

7 

As the mere sound of Canon Quexley’s voice, or one 
brief ejaculation of his canonical cough, was sufficient to 
bring the most unsteady Prestwich out of the influence of 
vocabularies and make straightway a subservient and 
snuffling verger of him, so this single touch of the in¬ 
exorable served to chill Miss Burford’s wrath like cold 
tap water, and bring it back with a shock into the con¬ 
fines of her own body whence it had so recently emerged 
in a supreme attempt (it seemed) to spread beyond all 
mortal barriers and join issue with infinity. 

The boy was gone. With his message delivered no 
further than “Please, Mr. Burford wishes to let Miss 
Burford know . . .”—the boy was gone. Disquiet 
peered out of her eyes in place of indignation. She dis¬ 
patched the maid to the kitchen with a disgust too deep 
to seek expression. 

“Get back with you,” she simply said. “If I’m to have 
messages that are meant for me I suppose I must answer 
my own door and take them for myself in future.” The 
maid, thankful to escape so lightly from the consequences 
of her mistress’s mistake, retired to the kitchen without 


302 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the need for any second bidding. Miss Burford betook 
her trouble to the dining-room, where, leaving the door 
ajar behind her that she might command all sounds from 
hall and kitchen, she plunged into a sea of speculation. 

Not alone for quarrel’s sake during these latter days 
had she sought to bring to a head the feud between her¬ 
self and father. Behind his stubborn silence danger dwelt 
for her. His independence, his aloofness, his disregard 
of all the gins laid out to trap his elusive anger; his un¬ 
remonstrant acceptance of the discomforts of domestic 
life—all these things charged the atmosphere about her 
with explosive forces. What rash projects were being 
wrought to maturity behind her father’s outward uncon¬ 
cern. What mine lay even now prepared to burst be¬ 
neath her feet? Already she had begun to suspect that 
the Councillor’s avoidance of all occasion for compromise 
issued from a source far deeper and deadlier than ob¬ 
stinacy. It showed design. Whatever plans he had, he 
intended they should be matured apart from her. And 
his choice of this messenger to-night lent substance to her 
worst fears. 

Very early she dismissed the maid to bed, with a 
solicitude for the girl’s repose that expressed no more 
than her own anxiety to have a free course and an open 
field when the Councillor returned. It was half-past ten 
when the Councillor came home. He retained in his mouth 
the assertive half of a cigar which he puffed with omi¬ 
nous complacency as he hung his hat and coat upon the 
hall-stand. In itself such a procedure was portentous. 
Not for years had he defied his daughter’s feelings with 
more than the clinging odour of the last cigar discarded 
on his way home or at the gate, that—even so—gave her 
pretext to sniff his garments with obvious disfavour. 
This evening she did not even sniff. 

“It’s you,” was all she said. 


THE SUITOR 


303 


“It’s me,” said her father. Without amplifying his 
acknowledgment he walked into the dining-room and 
turned up the gas. 

“What!” He wheeled from the globe to the table and 
swept his eye across it. “There’s no supper for me, 
then!” 

“Supper?” said his daughter with a look and voice of 
triumphant expostulation. “At this time of night? Of 
course there isn’t.” 

He repeated her words in the interrogative. “Of 
course there isn’t?” 

“Of course there isn’t,” Miss Burford said again more 
doggedly. “I didn’t know what you would be wanting. 
How is it likely? You go }^our ways without the least re¬ 
gard for me. I don’t count. I’m the last person to be 
told Anything.” 

“But you got my message,” he said, breaking into her 
words unceremoniously. “Didn’t you?” 

The question, if it did nothing else, gave her at least 
assurance of one thing. Her father was ignorant of her 
treatment of the Sausage Boy. To such extent, there¬ 
fore, her wrath was to the good, having no need to fear 
the employment of this dangerous arm against her. 

“A nice idea!” she said. “Sending messages at half¬ 
past seven, with the fish cooked and wasted. No wonder 
decent girls won’t stop. They won’t put up with such 
goings on. I don’t blame them.” 

The Councillor drew his chair away from the end of 
the table and sat down upon it with a heavy gesture of 
weariness. 

“I’m just about tired of all this, Annie,” he said. It 
was the announcement long waited for, that she had his 
permission to divulge her wrongs. 

“You’re not more tired than me,” Miss Burford re¬ 
taliated, touching a corner of the table-cloth for no rea- 


304 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


son whatever, save to emphasize her indignation. “Ever 
since . . . for the last goodness knows how long, life 
hasn’t been worth living.” 

“I’m about tired of it,” her father said again. “When 
a man comes home after a long day’s business . . .” 

His daughter plucked that last word from his lips and 
tore it to nothing, with a tone. 

“Business!” 

“Yes, Business!” her father asseverated. “My busi¬ 
ness. Not your business. Not anybody’s business but 
my own.” 

“Do you pretend to call Mrs. Holmroyd business?” she 
taxed him. 

“Who’s talking about Mrs. Holmroyd?” he demanded. 
“What’s Mrs. Holmroyd got to do with it?” His colour 
had risen and deepened and his eye, exerting itself to 
quell his daughter’s sceptic look, grew defiantly hard. 

“You know best what Mrs. Holmroyd’s got to do with 
it,” she answered. “You see a deal more of her than what 
I do.” She hazarded the stroke. “As like as not it’s 
where you’ve just come from.” 

Her intuition, misled by anger, played her false. 

“Is it?” he demanded emphatically. “That’s where 
your cleverness is wrong, Annie,” he said decisively. 
“I’ve come straight back from business. I was sat work¬ 
ing in my office while ten minutes ago.” 

“But you’ve been to Mrs. Holmroyd’s house to-night. 
Don’t tell me you haven’t.” 

The Councillor half rose from his chair and flicked the 
ash of his cigar towards the fireplace. It fell short of 
the fender and spilt itself in grey powder on the hearth¬ 
rug. But though this disgraceful act must be redeemed 
before she went to bed to-night, Miss Burford knew bet¬ 
ter now than to comment upon it. 

“I’m fifty-nine years of age,” the Councillor declared. 


THE SUITOR 


305 


“Going on for sixty. If I’m not old enough to take care 
of myself and manage my own affairs at my time of life 
it’s not likely I ever shall be.” 

“You’re certainly old enough to set folks talking about 
you,” his daughter threw in. 

“Your friends, I suppose!” said her father. 

“No. Not my friends!” Miss Burford contended, 
though a darkening flush betrayed the shot struck home. 
“Other people. People who are no friends of mine and 
don’t talk about things just to please me” 

“Let ’em talk to please who they like,” said her father. 
“I’ve no time to bother with such people.” 

“No,” his daughter acquiesced. “You go off to busi¬ 
ness, and goodness only knows where, and leave me to 
bear the brunt. They don’t say what they think to You. 
They say it to me. What else do you expect—carrying 
on the way you are.” 

“Carrying on!” said the Councillor, stung by the ex¬ 
pression. “What do you mean, woman? Have you taken 
leave of your senses?” 

“No, but I think you have,” Miss Burford blazed at 
him. “You’re not the same man. Everybody remarks 
it. You think because that woman lets you do as you 
like in her house that you can do the same at home. You 
used to have some respect for yourself at one time, and 
come back at decent hours, when people expected you. 
Now you’ve none.” 

“That’ll do!” said the Councillor. “That’ll do, I tell 
you! When it comes to ‘that woman’ as you’re pleased 
to call her, I won’t sit in this room and hear her insulted. 
Neither by you nor by anybody else. Do you hear that? 
Mrs. Holmroyd is a lady.” 

“O, thank you,” said Miss Burford with an acid polite¬ 
ness. “That means to say I aren’t.” 

“No,” answered the Councillor with blunt directitude. 


306 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“You aren’t, Annie. You never will be. You never was.” 

“Whatever I am or may be,” his daughter flung at him 
hotly, “I’ve got you to thank for.” 

“Perhaps you have,” the Councillor replied. 

“You should have given me a better education then,” 
his daughter cried. “If you’d wanted me to be a lady 
you should have made me one.” 

“You can’t make a lady,” her father said with emphasis. 
“A lady makes herself. It’s born with her. It grows up 
with her. It’s part of herself. If you’d had as much 
edjication as Mrs. Holmroyd, you’d have used it, like 
you use the house, to make everybody else uncomfortable.” 

“Thank you,” said his daughter. “If I don’t know 
what I’m thought of now, I don’t need to blame you for 
not telling me. I know I’m a bad cook, and a wretched 
housekeeper, and an ungrateful daughter—for you’ve told 
me so lots of times. But that’s not all. There’s some¬ 
thing else, surely ! What is it ?” 

“It’s this,” said her father. “I’d begun to forget what 
a home was intended for; what it ought to be—until I 
saw one for myself at Spring Bank Gardens!” 

“Oh! There!” remarked Miss Burford. “I knew we 
should get back there , at last.” 

“Yes, there!” said the Councillor. “I believe you think 
there’s only one house in Daneborough—and that’s this, 
that’s supposed to be mine. You never enter other 
houses but what you come back and speak scorn of ’em. 
But there’s more comfort in Mrs. Holmroyd’s parlour 
than there is here with all the rooms put together. Go 
any time you like and the place seems ready for you. It 
never changes. Mrs. Holmroyd isn’t a rich lady. She’s 
a poor lady. She’s probably a good deal poorer than 
she’s willing to admit. But what’s on her table you’re 
welcome to. It doesn’t take her two months to make up 
her mind to ask anybody to a cup of tea and a piece of 


THE SUITOR 


307 


seed cake. She has her children at a word—and not a 
rough word either. A look’s enough. When you was 
their age there was no controlling you. You wouldn’t 
be said. They only talk when they’re talked to, and it’s 
a treat to hear ’em. I’ve spoken against edjication. 
And I’m ready to speak against it now, in a general way. 
There’s far too much of it. It gets into the wrong hands, 
—into the hands of them that was never meant by Nature 
to have it, and that only harms themselves and others 
with it. But when I see what edjication can do for 
people, it makes me think. I’ve never seen Mrs. Holm- 
royd in a temper all the time I’ve known her. I’ve never 
seen her put out, even. She’s not for ever worrying to 
know what people will think because there’s a hole in the 
carpet, or the sofa springs are broke. Why? Because 
of her edjication. Because she’s a mind above such 
things. Because a lady’s always a lady, and there’s no 
mistaking her. That’s why.” 

“And are you such a fool,” said his daughter, with a 
contempt upon her face that seemed to despair of the 
Councillor’s intelligence, “. . . as to think yourself 
clever enough to judge what sort of a woman Mrs. Holm- 
royd really is by what she chooses to let you see? Do 
you think she’s always just the same as what she pretends 
to be for your benefit, when you call?” 

“For my benefit?” asked the Councillor. “What non¬ 
sense are you talking now?” 

“If I don’t know my own sex by this time,” Miss Bur- 
ford said, “I’m very sure you never will. Pshaw! I could 
slap the faces of some of them. But wait till they get 
you. Wait till they have you like that!” She twisted 
her thumb and forefinger tyrannically together. “And 
then what do they say, and do, and look like!” Her in¬ 
dignation, replenished from some invisible source, rose up 
once more, threatening to overflow its banks. “Don’t 


308 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


think I’m to be talked over to that woman by you. Don’t 
think I haven’t seen through her already, and you too. 
If you fancy I’ll submit tamely to remain in this house 
when once she sets foot in it, you’re very much mistaken. 
Both of you. So now you know.” 

The Councillor, with three or four rapid puffs, sucked 
the last goodness out of his cigar and threw the chewed 
stump into the fender. 

“So now I know!” he said, rising to his feet and push¬ 
ing the chair back once more against the table. “Aye. 
That’s quite right, Annie. Now T know. And are you 
sure,” he taxed her, with a sudden.access of anger in his 
cheek, “—that Mrs. Holmroyd’s so anxious to set foot 
in this house and share its roof with such as me and you?” 

There was something in the defiance of her father’s face 
and question that rudely buffeted Miss Burford’s con¬ 
fidence, but she abated nothing of her certitude or 
acrimony. 

“I should hope you’d never be such a fool as to give her 
the chance,” she answered. 

“What!” her father said. “Is a man so much of a fool 
because he risks being made miserable by a wife rather 
than a daughter? A wife’s a wife when all’s said and 
done. If I could be as sure as you profess to be . . . 
I’d take my chance, Annie. Fool or no fool. But I lack 
your confidence. Mrs. Holmroyd has no ambition to 
make herself a grocer’s wife.” 

“What!” exclaimed his daughter indignantly. “Do 
you mean she’s impudence enough to set up her nose at a 
Town Councillor?” 

“Aye,” said her father. “If it comes to a question of 
what you say it does—she has. Money looks for money, 
and breeding looks for breeding, and edjication looks for 
edjication. Councillor Burford and his daughter may 
think themselves very great people among folks with no 


THE SUITOR 


309 


more edjication than themselves, and no more money—or 
even less. But as soon as they leave their own circle and 
meet edjicated people—they’re nobodies at once. And 
they know it, Annie, if they’re wise.” 

His daughter’s eyes had dilated with a curious under¬ 
standing, half-defiant, half triumphant, as her father 
spoke. 

“What? . . . Do you mean?” . . . 

“I mean what I say,” he answered quickly. “I know 
Mrs. Holmroyd better than what you do. We’re friends. 
And that’s all. That’s all we’re ever likely to be. It 
would take a better man than me and a better home than 
this to tempt her to be anything different. Now I’m 
going to bed.” 

They exchanged Good Nights with voices relapsed from 
the vehemence of disputation to the weariness of prosaic 
reality. 

“I wonder!” said Miss Burford with the deepest intro¬ 
spection as she took the fire-shovel and hearth-brush to 
the spatter of cigar ash on the rug. “Has he lowered 
himself to ask her? Has she had the impudence to re¬ 
fuse him?” . . . 

“Pshaw!” 

She was glad now, in this hour of her reprieve, that 
she had sent the Sausage Boy so ignominiously about his 
business. She despised her father, but she hated Mrs. 
Holmroyd. 


8 

The Councillor had not partaken of tea at Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s as his daughter suspected. Such, to be sure, had 
been his purpose, but procrastination is the thief of con¬ 
fidence not less than of time. Between thoughts of 
Spring Bank Gardens and his daughter’s darkened face 


310 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


awaiting him at home, the insidious moments crept over 
his faculties like paralysis. Irresolution lays hold of all 
men at its own hour and in its own place. Standing upon 
the doors of destiny this large figure of flesh and blood 
whom Oswald venerated as a being invulnerable to fear, 
was the victim of as many doubts as the Sausage 
Boy’s own self when he rang or knocked at unfamiliar 
doors. 

If Miss Burford had been startled by the belated ring¬ 
ing of the front bell, Mrs. Holmroyd was scarcely less 
surprised to hear the Councillor’s well-known footstep in 
her passage somewhat earlier. Elizabeth had been and 
gone, leaving the school-room damp and chastened. Tea 
was long since over. Oswald had returned from deliver¬ 
ing the last of the week’s pies—sadly reduced in number. 
In the centre of the kitchen floor stood Beryl’s bath, 
ready to send up its wreaths of vapour for the reception 
of her small body. Already she sat upon a chair before 
the fire. Oswald, having returned the basket to its place 
at the cellar-head, occupied the music stool in the parlour, 
practising five-finger exercises from the open pages of 
“Pleasant Paths to Musical Proficiency, adapted to the 
use of Small Hands by Arthur Rencil!” As he played, 
he counted conscientiously aloud, for had not Mr. Rencil 
told him that to count aloud was already half way toward 
playing with talent, and that all the Great Composers had 
been incorrigible Counters from their Cradle? In fact, 
he recommended Oswald to count to his footsteps in walk¬ 
ing, and to go up and down stairs in every conceivable 
time—duple, common, three-four and six-eight in a bar. 
Much (he said) could be accomplished in this way, and 
Oswald’s loyalty being somewhat quicker than his sense 
of humour took the Organist at his word. He counted 
so cheerfully when he practised that, at a distance, it 
sounded more like a singing lesson; and if his vocal ardour 


THE SUITOR 


311 


showed a tendency to flag his mother’s voice was ever 
ready to exhort him gently: 

“Oswald.” 

“Yes, mother?” 

“Count dear!” 

Whereat his voice, thus called on, straightway rose 
again to fill the room with fervour. 

“One And. Two— And. Three— And.” 

He counted with the more enthusiasm to-night because 
of his music lesson received this morning, and because— 
being the deliverer of a medium pork pie at the Organist’s 
brass plate—the Organist in person had found him there 
and led him into the up-stairs room by an ear, with the 
announcement: 

“Ethel! This is the rascal who rings our bell. I’ve 
just caught him in the act. What’s this in his basket? 
It’s a pie. Alice, come and take it away from him. 
We’ll have it for breakfast to-morrow. I’ll teach him 
to ring my bell as if he were the Water Rate.” 

Not only that, but the Organist’s little daughter—who 
was bigger than Beryl and infinitely more beautiful than 
Miss Bankett—after whispering in her mother’s ear, 
brought Oswald two pieces of fruit cake. (She had 
solicited but one alone, for Oswald’s sake. It was her 
mother who said there must be two—remembering Os¬ 
wald’s sister.) The two pieces, wrapped in cream-laid 
writing-paper, were put by the Organist’s daughter’s self 
into Oswald’s side-pocket with the carefullest regard to 
safety, and he left this house of dreams like a blind man, 
lit only by the internal brightness of his brain. For long 
ago, this history must confess, the granddaughter of the 
late Alderman Bankett had abdicated her throne within 
the empire of the Sausage Boy’s affection, in Alice Rencil’s 
favour. By comparison with the Organist’s little daugh¬ 
ter, indeed, Miss Bankett’s voice was harsh; her eye hard; 


312 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


her manners cold and variable; imparting capricious con¬ 
fidences with the condescension for coppers, and turning 
on the recipient next moment the coldest eye of charity. 
There was something almost Burfordian in her self¬ 
content. When she subjected the Sausage Boy to scru¬ 
tiny he could never quite be sure whether her look be¬ 
spoke friendship, indifference or contempt. But the Or¬ 
ganist’s little daughter looked at him always with the 
commingled softness of her parents’ eyes. No embar¬ 
rassment ever mitigated the directness of her gaze, which, 
however, was only insufferable when there were present 
other witnesses of it. She looked straight into Oswald’s 
eyes, offering her gaze to his as she might have given 
him her hand to clasp and hold. Sometimes over her very 
slate in his mother’s school their eyes met thus, and 
though Oswald was far too conscientious a son and stu¬ 
dent to lend encouragement to the least scholastic breach, 
or waste of time, the look—troubling one side of his 
nature—afforded wonderful incentive to the other. Re¬ 
gardless of all previous vows, this was now the widow 
who stumbled to his aldermanic grave-side in her cum- 
berment of tears and crape, supported by the sympathies 
and mourning of a town. And if the young lady with 
the straight legs and the exceptional capacity for sulking 
displayed a tendency to demonstrate her best behaviour 
where Oswald was concerned, she expended her efforts in a 
lost but admirable cause. 

“Ma’am!” 

The sound of the Councillor’s voice, confirming his 
footsteps, brought the music and the counting and the 
vivid dreams by which they were accompanied to a sudden 
stop, and caused Mrs. Holmroyd with celerity to draw 
down her sleeves. Hastily commending Beryl to the pro¬ 
tection of her own rectitude, that must on no account 
touch the blazing fire—or play with matches,—she went 


THE SUITOR 


313 


to receive her visitor before he should advance further. 
He stood blocking the passage by the parlour door. 

“Perhaps you’re busy, ma’am,” he said uneasily at 
sight of her. “I’m a busy man myself. Saturday’s no 
night for calling, I’m aware. There’s a shopful of cus¬ 
tomers waiting of me any time I care to go back to ’em. 
But I just ... Is that your son inside the room? I 
thought I couldn’t be mistaken. I wonder . . . Do you 
think you could spare him to do a small errand for me? 
No farther than my own house, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. 
Holmroyd, sensible of the maternal solicitude expressed 
by the mere suspicion of a pause before she answered— 

“To be sure. I think so, Mr. Burford.” 

“I’ve been that pressed at business to-day, ma’am,” 
the Councillor explained, “that I’ve had no time to get 
back home for tea. I just want to ease my daughter’s 
mind and let her know I shan’t be home while late.” 

And as Oswald, furnished with his mother’s sanction, 
and armed with cap and gloves and overcoat, took word 
for word the message from the Councillor’s lips, commit¬ 
ting it to the safest pocket of his memory, and turned to 
go, the big voice suddenly recalled him. 

“Wait a moment my lad! (With your permission, 
ma’am.)” 

Whereat the large hand sought most unexpectedly 
Oswald’s own; opened the small fingers that made a polite 
movement of resistance and withdrawal, and impressed on 
the palm of Oswald’s glove something hard and circular, 
over which it closed the reluctant fingers as if to seal 
reception with finality. “There! Now get along with 
you.” 

9 

It was the first time that Councillor Burford had called 
at the house in Spring Bank Gardens since the night of his 


314 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


daughter’s tea-party, and though meanwhile he had twice 
commented on the weather in his own shop, and tran¬ 
scribed Mrs. Holmroyd’s needs upon his duplex tablet with 
an effusion so spacious that personality seemed somewhat 
lost in it, Oswald’s mother could not resist the feeling that 
this unexpected visit derived its motive (and some of its 
embarrassment) from the evening just over a week ago 
when he had incurred his daughter’s obvious displeasure 
by inviting her to high tea. For the Councillor was 
patently ill at ease. 

“I’ve meant calling on you for some time, ma’am,” he 
saw fit to explain in crossing to the fireplace. “But as a 
matter of fact . . . Why, to tell the truth, I’ve been 
rather busy. Busier than usual. My own daughter was 
only saying to me last night that she didn’t seem to see 
nothing of me at home in these days.” 

The mention of his daughter, succeeded by a silence on 
the Councillor’s part, as if his conversational reserves in 
this direction were at an end, prompted Mrs. Holmroyd 
to ask after the health of her hostess of a week ago. 

“Thank you,” the Councillor replied, “she’s very well.” 
The word “well” however, appeared to stick in his throat, 
for he said (stroking his felt hat) : “When I say ‘well,’ I 
should say she’s middling, ma’am. Only middling. 
That’s all she’s been for a goodish while now. But you’ll 
know what Annie is,” he told his listener, “as well as me. 
If she isn’t worrying herself she’s worrying other people. 
I think the house is too much for her. She can’t manage 
it.” 

In these words, thrown out as it were into space whilst 
the Councillor rubbed his coat sleeve meditatively round 
his hat, Mrs. Holmroyd fancied her visitor insinuated a 
general apology for any shortcomings in his daughter’s 
social qualifications that might have been divulged last 
week. Not wishing to participate in the least dissection 


THE SUITOR 


315 


of Miss Burford’s character she contented herself with 
a face and phrase of polite regret that his daughter’s 
health left so much to be desired, and by way of quitting 
the topic graciously bade the Councillor sit down. He 
put up his hat at once, like a barrier, against the sug¬ 
gestion, protesting: 

“No, no, ma’am. I didn’t come to sit down. Satur¬ 
day night’s no night for a chair. I haven’t sat down in 
a chair of a Saturday night before the shutters were put 
up for five and twenty, thirty, five and thirty years and 
more. Sunday’s my day. I don’t say No to the easy 
chair of a Sunday afternoon.” 

She had hoped he would refuse, for all her mother’s 
heart was pulled towards the kitchen where her little 
daughter sat. Oswald was gone away, and to the little 
sitter on her lonely chair she feared the kitchen might be¬ 
come a very vast and formidable space. 

Yet having declined the proffered seat and so allayed 
anxiety, the Councillor to her sudden consternation, sat 
down upon it. At that her mother’s heart could be denied 
no longer. She begged him to excuse her . . . but her 
little girl was sitting all alone . . . before the fire. 
Might she just call her into the room. To Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s deepening concern he jumped to his feet at once. 

“Not on my account, ma’am!” he said. “I said I 
hadn’t come to detain you, and what I have to say can 
be said as well standing as sitting. It won’t take me a 
moment. It’s just a small matter of business I’d like to 
speak to you about.” 

A small matter of business. But small matters of busi¬ 
ness, Mrs. Holmroyd knew, were capable of infinite ex¬ 
tension. And her mother’s heart submitted to the kitchen- 
tug. With a hurried apology, declaring she would be not 
a moment gone, she betook herself to the source of her 
solicitude. 


316 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Beryl!” 

The small voice answered. The small and solitary fig¬ 
ure, seated before the fire in an attitude of adorable 
obedience, touched the heart it so disquieted. She put the 
guard before the fire, folded back the edges of the bath 
mat, imposed new loyalty and confidence with a kiss. 
For a short while Beryl must be good. She must touch 
nothing, fear nothing. The doors were open; her mother 
was close at hand and ready for the slightest call. She 
went back to the sitting-room to find the Councillor seated 
once more in the chair so recently vacated. Her advent 
brought him to his feet again. 

“We was just talking about my daughter, ma’am,” he 
said, reverting to their conversation’s earlier phase. 
“And I was saying . . He crossed the room and 
closed the door with a push of his flat hand as if oblivious 
of the least external charge on Mrs. Holmroyd’s care. 
“And I was saying, ma’am,” he repeated on his way back 
to the fireplace, “that the house seems more than she can 
manage. It isn’t for want of trying. She’s always try¬ 
ing, is Annie. She tries too hard. She thinks a house 
can’t be kept in order unless a woman makes herself a 
martyr to it. She never seems happy unless she’s mis¬ 
erable. If I carried on at business like what she does at 
home ... I might just as well shut the shop up. That’s 
not what the house wants. I know what it wants better 
than she does. It wants a mistress. 

“. . . Now I flatter myself I’m a business man, and I 
can take a straight business answer. Yes or No, when 
it’s given me. You’ve seen the house, ma’am, and you 
know what sort of a house it is. And you’ve known me 
now for longer than a day, and you must have formed 
your own conclusions as to what sort of man I am.” 

Up to this point Mrs. Holmroyd had contributed a 
look of sympathetic attention to the Councillor’s words 


THE SUITOR 


317 


without the faintest knowledge of their import. And it 
came upon her with the dislocative jar that racks the 
semi-sleeper on his bed to find herself all at once paying 
serene interest to what amounted in truth to a proposal. 
Dreadful doors and windows of enlightenment seemed 
simultaneously flung open in her consciousness. Through 
a hundred gaping inlets the incredible truth reached her. 
Of all contingencies this had been the least suspected. 
The thought of her children, the memory of her hus¬ 
band—rendered more precious if possible by the ap¬ 
proaching sanctity of Eastertide—smote her conscience 
as if, in some degree, it were to blame for what had hap¬ 
pened. All her soul rose up to protect the sacred things 
committed to its care. The Councillor passed an uneasy 
sleeve around the circumference of his hat. 

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said contritely, “. . . if I’ve 
spoke too abrupt or took you in any way by surprise. I 
was hoping you wouldn’t be altogether unprepared for 
what I had to say.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd begged him: “Pray do not mention 
it,” and added after a pause in which he showed no dis¬ 
position to speak again: “You are very kind, Mr. Bur- 
ford. I ought to be deeply sensible of the confidence you 
place in me. . . . But it is quite, quite impossible.” 

“Not impossible, I hope, ma’am,” the Councillor be¬ 
sought her. “Impossible’s a hard word. Perhaps I’ve 
come upon you at an inconvenient time. Saturday’s an 
awkward night, I know, for anything. It’s no sort of a 
night even for my business. I’d sooner see customers any 
night but that, and it’s only customers that can’t help 
themselves that ever comes on it. . . . But I’m a plain 
straightforward business man, and X like to go about 
things in a plain straightforward way. When a thing’s 
on my mind I want to have it settled. As soon as you 
came into the shop this morning I says to myself: ‘Let’s 


318 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


get it settled to-day. Get it settled before Sunday. 
Here’s Good Friday coming on, and Easter Monday after 
it, and nothing more’s to be gained by waiting.’ 

“ . . . I don’t want to boast about myself, ma’am,” he 
continued, “but I’ve got a good business of my own, and 
I venture to think I can offer you a comfortable home. 
You’ve seen it. You know what it is. There’s not a 
finer view in Daneborough. The front bedrooms look 
right across the Town Acres to the Race Course. 
With your eye for scenery, ma’am, I don’t doubt but 
what you’d enjoy the view. As for myself, I don’t make 
no pretences. I’m just what you see me. I’m blunt and 
plain and straightforward. What I say I’ll do, I do; 
and what I say I won’t do, I don’t do. I think I can 
claim the respect of all my fellow townsmen. They’ve 
honoured me with their confidence by giving me a seat 
on the Council, and so far as one can see it won’t be long 
now before I’m honoured with the mayoralty.” 

Troubled with his confidences, that acquired a simple 
and childlike quality in issuing from so large a man, Mrs. 
Holmroyd had lacked the heart to interrupt his plead¬ 
ings, hopeless though she knew them to be. 

“O, please, please, Mr. Burford!” she begged at last. 
“If my personal esteem is anything . . . you have it. 
But you scarcely understand. My Husband . . .” Her 
voice dropped at the solemnity of the word like a wor¬ 
shipper upon a knee. “My husband has not been dead 
two years.” 

“Why, for the matter of that, ma’am,” the Councillor 
consoled her. “I’m a widower myself, as you know, and 
I buried as good a wife as any man might wish to lose. 
We’re both in the same boat. I think we ought to be 
able to understand each other the better for that. We 
can’t go on living with the Dead for ever, ma’am. It’s 
not in Nature. The Living can be bad enough at times. 


THE SUITOR 


319 


We’re neither of us so young as we were. I don’t know 
for certain; I’ve never presumed to ask you; but I sup¬ 
pose you’ve touched the thirties, ma’am. And I shall be 
fifty-nine come Whitsuntide. I think we’re old enough 
to make up our minds for ourselves, without troubling 
a deal about what other people thinks or says. I know 
you suit me very well, ma’am, and I’d hoped I might have 
suited you well enough to justify you giving me a trial. 
You’ve given my goods a trial, and I’ll make bold to say 
you don’t regret it. I don’t think you’d find me in any 
way inferior to what I sell.” 

There was little she could say; little she could do— 
beyond deepening the sadness in her face to translate a 
resolution sorrowing and unshaken. 

“It is no defect of confidence on my part, Mr. Bur- 
ford,” she told him. “You are right in thinking you have 
that. Implicitly. But . . . what you ask demands so 
much more than that. I can scarcely tell you all that my 
husband meant to me; all that we meant to one another. 
Even to speak of such a matter . . . with his face look¬ 
ing at me from the mantelpiece . . . seems dreadful.” 

The thought, indeed, oppressed her. This disparity 
between the living and the dead was too abrupt. Had 
the burly Councillor recalled in any wise her husband’s 
virtues or shared even some familiar imperfections made 
dear by death, she might have trembled at the prospect of 
a living memorial to one so loved, that should bring back 
however feebly the happiness of the past. For one brief 
moment, indeed, an awful thought assailed her, that came 
unbidden and vanished in a flush of shame. What (she 
wondered) would have been her treatment of this offer 
had it come to her through such lips as those of the Or¬ 
ganist of St. Saviour’s? The thought, swift as a winged 
arrow, pierced conscience in its flight and brought two 
slow tears of anguish to her eyes. Believing himself the 


320 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


instigator of them the Councillor quickly turned atten¬ 
tion to his hat. 

“I won’t say your feelings doesn’t do you credit,” he 
said, rotating his hand about the crown. “Great credit. 
They’re such as any edjicated lady might be proud to 
own. . . . But I won’t detain you any longer. I didn’t 
tell ’em where I was going to when I left the Shop, and I 
daresay they’re wondering what’s got me. With your 
permission . . . I’ll leave you.” He paused and added: 
“To think over what I’ve said at leisure, ma’am. Take 
your own time. I know I’ve spoken a bit sudden. You’ve 
all Sunday before you. Give my words your best atten¬ 
tion then, ma’am, and look at them from a common-sense, 
practical point of view, in the best light you can. If 
you’ll allow me I’ll perhaps call round in the course of 
the week. Say Tuesday or Wednesday. Or Friday, if 
you’d like that better. Your little boy will be at the 
choir practice then, I believe.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd tendered her deep and humid gratitude 
for this final testimony of the Councillor’s thoughtfulness. 
But she begged he would take her answer now. She 
begged he would not compel her to reopen a subject pos¬ 
sessed of so many painful associations for her. He fixed 
on his hat a look of prolonged reflection, as though the 
two of them took counsel together. 

“Then you feel it must be ‘No,’ ma’am,” he put to her. 

She answered: “If you please, Mr. Burford.” 

And unable once again to contain the disquiet welling 
up within her heart, she undid the door his hand had 
shut and breathed her little daughter’s name to the silence 
beyond. 

“Beryl!” 

The small voice answered, and the small feet showed 
a quickness to respond, but she restrained them. 


THE SUITOR 


321 


“No, no, I was not calling for you, dear. Wait 
awhile, Beryl. Don’t go near the fire. Mother will not 
be long.” 

She did not shut the door again. The Councillor 
looked at it (she thought) as if for very little his oblivi¬ 
ousness of the precious guardianship it stood for would 
have led him once again to complete the work with a 
brusque hand. She said, apologetically; “I always leave 
the door ajar, Mr. Burford. So that I can hear my chil¬ 
dren, in case they call.” 

“I’ve noticed you pay ’em a deal of attention, ma’am,” 
he acknowledged. 

“Perhaps you may think me foolish. . . .” she began. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted with candour. “It’s diffi¬ 
cult to say one way or another while your children grows 
up. That’s the test. If folks’ children grows up to be 
a pleasure and a comfort to their parents, no care has 
been too great to give ’em. My daughter was brought 
up in my way, ma’am. My way wasn’t your way . . . 
at that time. I’m apt to think I don’t get a great deal 
of comfort nor yet too much credit with her. A family’s 
an investment, and one doesn’t know whether it’s a good 
one or a bad one till time shows. With some you can in¬ 
vest all your affection in it and still it won’t pay you 
a ha’porth of interest. And with others every blessing 
you indulge them with comes back at a hundred per cent. 
If your family returns you half the attention you’ve given 
’em, ma’am, you ought to be a rich and happy woman 
some day. I hope you may be. Good-night, ma’am.” 

He held out his hand. Mrs. Holmroyd stirred within 
herself by these last words and by the remorse for a 
plea so rigidly refused, gave him her compassionating 
fingers in return. The broad hand engulfed them and 
held them for an appreciable space of time. 


322 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“I’m venturing to conclude, ma’am,” the Councillor re¬ 
marked in a lowered voice, “that what has just transpired 
is in strict confidence between ourselves.” 

The shocked look upon her face answered him without 
the protestation of her lips. 

“To be sure!” he said, relieved. “I shan’t say nothing 
about it. And you won’t. There’s no call to make no¬ 
body as wise as ourselves. Silence doesn’t cost nothing, 
and it’s worth a bookful of words.” 

. . . “There’s another thing,” he added, clearing his 
throat, for the unwonted subjugation of his usually un¬ 
compromising voice to a whisper had the effect of ren¬ 
dering it husky and unmanageable. “We’re both of us 
common-sense practical people. I hope that what’s took 
place won’t be allowed to make no difference between us.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd assured him, “O, certainly not. Cer¬ 
tainly not, Mr. Burford.” She thought of Oswald and 
Beryl and her little school. 

“I’m glad to hear you say so, ma’am,” the visitor said. 
“I felt sure it’s what you would say. I hope to merit 
the continuance of your custom, ma’am, and by strict at¬ 
tention to business combined with civility and prompti¬ 
tude, to retain your confidence. There’s nothing you 
happened to overlook when you was ordering this morn¬ 
ing? Tinned fruits? Sardines? No? Then you think 
that’ll be all to-day. Very good, ma’am. Don’t trouble 
yourself to come to the door.” 

The effect produced on Mrs. Holmroyd by his de¬ 
parture was curious, and unaccountably depressing. He 
drew the front door behind him with manifest concern to 
make no noise, but even so the knocker responded to its 
closing with a faint and apathetic echo. Mrs. Holmroyd 
heard the Councillor try the knob, to be sure of its 
security behind him. Then his footsteps faded into 


THE SUITOR 


323 


silence, seeming less firm and resonant than usual. They 
passed out of hearing almost at once, and the desolation 
of a great solitude succeeded his departure. Filled with 
the sudden horror of life’s loneliness Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
heart turned with a despairing hunger towards her 
children. 

As the Councillor left the house behind him, his over¬ 
coat unbuttoned; his two hands plunged into the respec¬ 
tive pockets; his beard upon his breast; his broad feet 
moving leisurely; he was absorbed in the task of sweep¬ 
ing his mind clear of all its debris, and readjusting life 
once more to those realities it had, of late, lost sight of. 

“It makes things easier with Annie,” he reflected as he 
passed down the street. “Not that I’m under no obliga¬ 
tion to consider her . She doesn’t put herself out to con¬ 
sider me. She says I’ve got the shop, and she’s a right 
to the house. She has it to look after. Aye! that’s all 
very well. But I’ve got to live in it, and I’ve got it to 
pay for. And them that pays the piper has a right to 
call the tune. She can have her own tunes as much as 
she likes when I’m away. But when I’m at home, she’ll 
have to listen to mine.” 

At the bottom of the street, before passing out of it, he 
looked back wistfully into the darkness that held Mrs. 
Holmroyd and her home. 

“Aye!” he acknowledged to himself, “she’s a highly es¬ 
timable woman. She’s one in a thousand. One in ten 
thousand. If she’d only consented to be what I asked 
her, I could have thought myself a very fortunate man. 
With her at the head of it, home would have been some¬ 
thing like home to go back to. Not an empty farce, 
smelling of furniture polish and dusters like it is now.” 

“Well!” he reflected, (walking on again) she had re¬ 
fused him. By her answer at least was she freed, from 


324 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the odium and unworthiness of his doubts. Her friend¬ 
ship towards him had screened no policy. Her welcome 
dissimulated no design. 

“She’s treated me very well,” he consoled himself. “A 
man needn’t want to be refused politer. She’s done every¬ 
thing possible to respect my feelings. I couldn’t have 
asked for more consideration if it had taken place in the 
Council Chamber.” 

“After all,” he reflected as he neared the lights of High 
Gate, “she’s said ‘No.’ But what’s ‘No’? No isn’t world 
without end. No is No to-day and Not Quite Sure to¬ 
morrow. Both for her and me. I’ve perhaps been a 
little premature. Time soon shows up a bad bargain, 
but a good one has nothing to fear from it. Any bar¬ 
gain that’s worth having is worth waiting for.” 

Subdued, but not despondent, he mounted the three 
steps between the bulging windows in the High Gate and 
passed into his shop at last. 

“Boy! Move these boxes. Do you want Customers to 
fall over ’em?” “Good evening, ma’am. Are you being 
attended to?” “Now my lad, don’t push in front of peo¬ 
ple there. You won’t get served out of your turn.” 

10 

“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.” 

It was the voice of Oswald. He sat on the music stool 
once more, before the open music of “Pleasant Paths to 
Musical Proficiency adapted to the Use of Small Hands 
by Arthur Rencil,” on the lower portion of whose pages 
the gas-light silhouetted his head. Out of the kitchen 
came the babble of voices and the splash of bath water. 
From time to time he paused consciously, with his hands 
immobile upon the keys, that he might hear them. They 
ministered in some mystic incommunicable way to his con- 


THE SUITOR 


325 


tent; they were, although he did not know it, the divine 
sustenance on which his aspirations fed. Without this 
mother and this sister life was nothing, ambition had no 
meaning; his dreams were worthless merchandise lacking 
a market. These two, whose voices comforted and in¬ 
spired him as he worked, lent life whatever sweetness or 
significance it had; touching the future with the wonder 
reflected from their own faces. 

And whilst he listened to them through the notes played 
and the beats counted, they listened in turn to him, who 
was (not less) a part of their very selves; an extension 
of their own identities; an amplification of life, of hope, 
of home. 

“Oswald!” 

“Yes, mother.” 

“Count, dear!” 

Count? Ah, to be sure! He had momentarily lost 
sight of this material obligation in the sublimity of his 
thoughts. He sat on the music stool before his mother’s 
ancient piano, primly garbed in its high-necked, pleated 
pink bodice of a bygone age, but his fingers operated a 
keyboard in eternity, and his music caused the very stars 
to stop and listen. This was Oswald Holmroyd no longer. 
This was surely Mr. Rencil. These, beyond doubt, were 
Mr. Rencil’s eyes that looked at the page through large 
lensed spectacles. These, incontestably, were Mr. Ren¬ 
cil’s fingers that depressed the keys. Did not Oswald’s 
mother and his sister notice? He played the notes again, 
to confirm the Rencil-like quality in them. 

“Mother?” 

“Yes, dear.” 

“Are you listening?” 

“Yes, dear.” 

“Did you hear that?” 

“Yes, dear. It was beautiful. Count, dear!” 


326 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.” 

Illimitable wonders dwelt in these words. Words? 
They were no more words than he was merely Oswald. 
They were planets that left his lips and floated away to 
take their place in the firmament of eternal glories. 
Across his counter the Councillor plied a busy naked arm. 
In the sombre dining room, lit by its subdued and solitary 
gas, and darkened by Miss Burford’s wrathful face, Miss 
Burford paced like a caged leopard, awaiting the nox 
irae. But in the tranquillity of Mrs. Holmroyd’s little 
home a serene content, like the soulful fragrance that 
issues out of the vesper throats of flowers after the heat 
and burden of the day, mounted up to heaven on Oswald’s 
counting. 

“One—AND. Two—AND. Three—AND.” 


BOOK VIII 


THE DARK ANGEL 

1 

O NE evening in July Oswald Holmroyd and his 
mother came out through the western gateway 
of St. Saviour’s. Oswald walked slowly, with 
his more than Sunday walk, and from time to time he 
stole glances at his mother’s face, for it showed curiously 
divided. The lower half, taking its character from the 
set lips, seemed hard and almost stern; the upper half, 
subdued by the gleaming wetness of his mother’s eyes, 
presented a look of drenched submission, as of unresis- 
tant petals beaten down by heavy rain. They moved in 
silence, and for some considerable while no word had 
passed between them. Oswald himself was but a blurred 
and mute spectator of his mother’s tears. At the gate¬ 
way she said, speaking in a low voice: “Close it very 
gently, dear.” 

He answered “Yes, mother,” and closed it very gently 
as she bade him, taking prodigious care. For through 
the iron bars he held with both his hands he could descry 
the little grave they had just left. Its cracked and sun- 
scorched sods, replaced upon the tiny mound, contrasted 
harshly with the greener and untrodden grass around, 
and the still, white lilies they had stooped to lay upon 
it shone out at him through the evening air with the 
disturbing pallour of that small, dead face looked on so 
recently in silence and sorrow and wonderment, and much 
fear. She was there, then, the little sister he had played 

327 


328 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


with; who had shared this life of his so lately. Across 
the other graves that hemmed her in, and through the 
headstones that stood so silently, leaning a little towards 
each other as though they listened with great intent¬ 
ness, that one pathetic clay-soiled mound seemed to gaze 
after him with the supplication of his sister’s face, be¬ 
traying apprehensions at being left alone. It cried to 
him in all but w T ords: “Oswald . . . Don’t leave me . . . 
Stay with me. . . 

But he closed the gate and latched it, and let go of 
the handle quickly, saying in the low voice of custom: 
“Good night, Beryl,” and turned away with an accusing 
consciousness of cowardice. For, in truth, it seemed a 
dreadful thing to leave his sister there in such a solemn 
place, amid the dead of all ages, now that the sun was 
sinking fast, so that only the topmost taper of St. Sav¬ 
iour’s spire caught the last gilding of its rays, and the 
lengthening shadows of the gravestones stretched out like 
hands to touch each other, and his own shadow and the 
shadow of the gate by which he stood extended far from 
him across the sandy drive, and the sky and the trees 
and the green grass and the churchyard wall and all 
things else foretold the creeping silence of long night. 
Nay! He dared not; he dared not stay with her. For 
her death had reawakened all his latent horror of this 
place; it had revived such terrors as his vanity had 
almost dared to deem outgrown. And he hastened to 
his mother’s side, there to reassume his pace of deep 
dejection and solemnity, suitable to the grief he bore, 
and to the altered world he walked in. He was con¬ 
sumed with a steadfast sorrow, yet supported by a woe¬ 
ful pride appropriate to one who now can claim close 
kinship with Death. Every now and then he lifted up 
a corner of the sorrow that subdued him, as if it had 
been a lowered w r indow-blind, and stole a covert peep 


THE DARK ANGEL 


329 


at the outer world. Each time he saw himself regarded, 
he dropped the corner of the blind at once, and withdrew 
into his inmost solemnity, saying to himself: “She was 
my sister. I am the brother of the little girl who died.” 
And for a brief, unworthy while he was suffused with 
consequence, and his heart beat faster through desire to 
sustain befittingly the importance of this new dread role. 
Until, all at once, the wickedness of such a state of mind 
burned conscience as if it had been some fierce, great 
carbuncle, throbbing hot, and he drew the curtains of 
his sorrow close, and vowed he would peep no more upon 
the outer world. From the sight of children playing 
in the street he turned away his eyes, lest perchance he 
might be tempted in a thoughtless moment to take sinful 
pleasure in their sport, and taste enjoyment before he 
was aware. 

Yet God knows, in spite of all these contradictory 
emotions, that Oswald’s grief was great and genuine 
enough. He missed his sister dreadfully. At times the 
loss of her was like a universal heart-ache that filled all 
space; not a room or corner of the house but suffered it. 
When he told himself that he would never more ... No! 
never more see Beryl in this world; never more hear her 
voice; never more look into her eyes or clasp his two arms 
about her neck ... his lip trembled; his eyes burned; 
a pain crept up into his throat. Life without Beryl 
seemed unintelligible, like a sentence cut in twain. For 
ever he kept forgetting that his sister was dead. Always 
she seemed to be somewhere in the house, in some other 
room, in the kitchen, in the air about him; at his very 
elbow, causing him to turn sharply for a trepid sight of 
her before she should be gone. Now and again it seemed 
to him he heard her call his name: “Oswald! . . . 
Oswald! . . so clearly that, but for the dreadful, 
timely recollection of the truth, he would have cried back 


330 THE TREBLE CLEF 

to her: “Yes, Beryl? . . .” or run to seek the reason 
of her call. 

But now ... he dared not run. For all he loved 
and missed her, she had brought back secret terror into 
the house, into Oswald’s life. He lived in fear of her. 
Aye! It was a confession he would have dared to make 
to no one. To his mother least of all. She never sus¬ 
pected it. Never would she have credited that her son 
should entertain unworthy dread of his little, gentle, 
bygone sister, who had left them both to pass through 
Death’s dark doors into God’s eternal presence, all alone. 
But Oswald knew it, and the knowledge shocked him. 
He could not disencumber himself of those rebukeful, mor¬ 
tal fears that throve upon his sister’s memory and 
daunted courage. For now, for him, there were two 
Beryls. Of the little sister he had played with, who had 
laughed and run with him in hours of gladness, he felt 
no fear. No fear at all. But of that dead white sister 
he had last looked on in the preternatural stillness of 
her tiny coffin, who neither smiled nor spoke—he was 
terribly afraid. Not afraid by day, when the sun shone 
and the bright light seemed to be his guardian angel. 
But when the sun began to sink, and daylight dwindled, 
and the dusk crept tremulously into corners, and he 
thought disquietly of the lonely bed upstairs awaiting 
him. ... Oh! Then! how bitterly he missed his sis¬ 
ter. Even the sound of her voice charged with some 
nocturnal fear, had been welcome to him, establishing 
the close companionship of kindred terror that served 
to partner and to reassure his own. But this unfathom¬ 
able ocean of dead soundlessness in which hig lonely ap¬ 
prehensions struggled now dismayed and daunted him. 
In the uncommunicative silence of his solitary bed, in¬ 
tensified by the yet more awful stillness in the room 
beyond his own,—that never stirred; that never whis- 


THE DARK ANGEL 


331 


pered “Oswald!” or confessed a fear, or sought to be 
assured he was awake*—he plumbed the awful depth of 
solitude in which all human life is lived. A part of his 
very self seemed dead. 


2 


How had it all happened? 

So swiftly and so terribly that Oswald never under¬ 
stood. Life, like that reeling figure of his fears that 
issued from the doorway in the street near the Horse 
Green, plunged headlong all at once into the dreadful 
and unreal. He became the helpless witness of events 
so utterly remote from his experience as to appear in¬ 
credible. Again and again he asked himself, bewildered, 
if what had seemed to happen could be true; if it was 
not, rather, but a dream from which in time he would 
with thankfulness awake. His troubled mind persis¬ 
tently attributed the source of all its sorrow to a thun¬ 
derstorm, with which (preposterously) a bag of cherries 
was in some dire way associated. He had bought the 
cherries with a penny all his own, at a small green¬ 
grocer’s shop in one of the side streets lying off the lower 
end of Spring Bank Gardens; a shop made suffocating 
with the odour of vegetables and bruised fruit, which— 
ever afterwards—recalled for him this awful time of sick¬ 
ness and sorrow. At midday he and Beryl had partaken 
of the cherries, and that same afternoon the storm broke. 
For some days they had lived beneath the threat of it. 
The little school had turned so dark that needlework 
and penmanship were made impossible, the tense faces 
of the scholars—withdrawn, by prudence, from the prox¬ 
imity of the window—were absorbed into the gloom like 
inkspots dropped on blotting-paper. Over fender and 
fire-irons a bedroom mat was spread, that the glint of 


332 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


naked steel might offer no inducement to the lightning. 
For’the same sage reason even pens were put away, and 
the schoolroom gas was lit to relieve the deepening gloom, 
and Mrs. Holmroyd sought to distract her anxious 
charges with stories of the Good, interrupted by ejacu¬ 
lations from excited lips. 

“Ooh! Mrs. Holmroyd! Did you see that one!” 

“It’s coming nearer.” 

“Once when it lightened there was a chimbley pot 
struck in the street next but two from ours.” 

“Please Mrs. Holmroyd, my ma’s frightened of thun¬ 
der storms. They always give her sick headaches.” 

“My pa knows a man that was struck dead by light¬ 
ning for swearing. My pa says nobody ought ever to 
swear in a thunderstorm.” 

“Please, Mrs. Holmroyd, what’s thunder and lightning 
made of?” 

With awed voices they had discussed storms and the 
deity whilst the thunder rolled overhead and rocked the 
schoolroom with deafening reverberations. Torrential 
rain had fallen, whose furious drops rebounded to a foot’s 
height from the flooded flags and roadway, and flashed 
elongated in the lightning like electric sparks. Raging 
watercourses tore along the gutters, sweeping stones and 
papers in their flight, and soot and mortar—shaken by 
the thunder and dislodged by raindrops—tumbled down 
the schoolroom chimney and rattled alarmingly upon the 
hearth. 

And Beryl, alone of all the quaking scholars, had de¬ 
meaned herself with tears, running to Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
side for shelter, and hiding her head beneath her mother’s 
bosom; and Oswald had felt unworthily ashamed of his 
sister and the disgrace she drew upon herself and him. 
For she would not confess the thunder as the cause of 
her alarm; she pleaded sickness and a pain instead, and 


THE DARK ANGEL 


333 


into Oswald’s righteousness there crept a stern repug¬ 
nance of all falsehood. And when, at tea—the storm 
being over, and the thunder reduced to the mere rumble 
of a distant cart—Beryl pushed away her plate and 
wept afresh in lieu of eating, Oswald could not alto¬ 
gether rid his breast of the suspicion that she did this 
to cover up her earlier cowardice, and win back an 
alienated sympathy through tears. But thereafter 
events marched with terrible swift footsteps, like the re¬ 
sounding tramp of policemen, that brought dismay into 
his heart. The storm rolled altogether out of earshot; 
not the faintest lightning-flashes played upon the pulse 
of fear, and yet his little sister wept more dolorously—* 
deaf to consolation and the persuasive voice of love. 
When, by custom, he should have been seated at his eve¬ 
ning meal, a breathless Oswald was hastening to the 
doctor’s big brass plate in Hill Street, his bosom filled 
with dire forebodings, with a throbbing self-importance, 
and reflected pain, repeating to himself the urgent mes¬ 
sage with which his mother’s troubled lips had charged 
him. Long after, when Oswald would, of old, have been 
in bed, he still kept watch from the parlour window for 
the doctor’s coming, most dreadfully divided between the 
apprehensions of two senses: between the apprehensions 
of the eye that gazed into the street, and of the ear that 
hearkened through the thumping of his heart to bedroom 
sounds above. Aye! And of the conscience that bit¬ 
terly reproached him with those base, unjust suspicions 
of his little sister, and racked him with a hundred doubts 
respecting the delivery of his mother’s message at the 
doctor’s door. 

But the doctor came at last, a dire figure compounded 
of comforts and alarms that seemed to curdle the atmos¬ 
phere of dread it walked through, and the prolonged 
sound of lowered voices and creaking floor-boards made 


334 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Oswald’s heart sick. For some while after the doctor 
had taken leave of his mother at the front door, Oswald 
dared not emerge from his place of waiting in the 
kitchen; an inexpressible fear restrained him from mak¬ 
ing the least sign. Nor did his mother come in quest 
of him, or call upon his name immediately. She betook 
herself, instead, to the front parlour—whither the en¬ 
suing silence and the sense of his own solitude drove him 
timorously at last. He stole to the door, uttering the 
one word “Mother . . in a voice of supplication. He 
fancied—though he could not quite be sure, since trouble 
walked with downcast eyes—that she had been seated 
with both hands pressed to her face when first he spoke 
her name, but she was risen to her feet by the time he 
dared to lift his eyes, and answered “Now dear . . in 
a voice whose brightness seemed curiously at variance 
with the depth of silence from which it issued. 

“How is Beryl, mother?” 

“Beryl is very poorly, Oswald.” 

“What is the matter with her?” 

“The doctor says . . . He scarcely knows. He is 
coming to see her again in the morning, dear.” 

She did not tell him that the doctor had hinted darkly 
at inflammation of the bowels—in those days the vague 
term under which appendicitis hid—nor would Oswald 
have been much the wiser had she done so. Infinitely 
more significant for him was the glistening trouble on 
his mother’s cheeks which the resolute brightness of her 
voice had almost succeeded in its effort to conceal from 
him. The sight of her wet eyes, in which a desperate 
courage seemed to drown, caused an unspeakable wretch¬ 
edness to descend upon his soul. A mist of sickly ap¬ 
prehension darkened life, blotting from his vision all at 
once the comfortable things contained in it, and filling 


THE DARK ANGEL 


335 


it with ghastly images of silence and no shape; with 
featureless forebodings from which his cowardice desired 
to flee. When at length, with throbbing heart, he stole 
on tiptoe through the sickroom to his little sleeping 
place beyond, he scarcely dared to turn his eye towards 
the bed where Beryl lay, for fear of what dread spectacle 
his eye might meet. But his senses were poignantly 
aware of a small shape that writhed tormentedly be¬ 
neath the coverlet, and moaned in its breathing, and 
never said: “Oswald . . .” or raised its head. He 
closed the door between himself and sickness with an 
awful feeling of escape, as though the sight of pain were 
something to shut out and flee from. All that night his 
slumber seemed to be disturbed by dreams or dread dis¬ 
tortions of reality. At one time it was a wail of anguish 
from the adjoining bedroom, real or fancied, that fetched 
him violently out of sleep; at another it was the dreary 
sound of sobbing, lulled by his mother’s tranquillizing 
voice, that woke him. Now and again he was confusedly 
aware of sounds from the kitchen below, as if someone 
drew water from the tap, or raked the fire with care. 
Whether these things in fact awoke him or he awoke 
to them, they seemed to be without cessation: endless 
noises from a world of trouble. Peace never reigned in 
the sickroom or the world beyond, but a perpetual tor¬ 
ment turned in tired circles. He heard St. Gyles’s 
clock chime all sorts of unimaginable hours: twelves and 
thirteens and twenty-fours. From the railway goods- 
yard the stertorous snorts of locomotives, succeeded by 
the rapid ricochet of shunted waggons, churned the night 
with melancholy turmoil. Noise, noise, noise. He was 
for ever being brought to wide-eyed wakefulness by some¬ 
thing inexpressible that roused him: the clinking of a 
glass; the creaking of a bedstead; the movement of a 


336 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


foot upon the floor; the dreadful cry of tired pain that 
cannot find escape from its own existence through the 
doors of slumber. 

3 

Daybreak brought no respite; only a deepened wretch¬ 
edness. Early in the morning Oswald woke to the 
startled realization of his mother, gazing at him in si¬ 
lence from the bedroom door. 

<4 . . . I want you to go to Elizabeth’s for me,” she 
said, when his eyes recorded recognition of her at last. 
“. . . . Before she has time to get away to her work, 
dear. And ask her if she can possibly come and help 
me to-day.” 

Oswald’s eyes pricked and smarted through their long 
privation of repose, but he obeyed his mother’s order 
with alacrity, for any task is preferable to the suspense 
of tossing on a bed that offers neither sleep nor com¬ 
fort; of being the stricken witness of sufferings beyond 
one’s power to redeem. Before St. Gyles’s clock chimed 
half-past six he stood outside Elizabeth’s house in the 
narrow, disillusioned street where this rabid worker dwelt. 
Yet early though he knocked, the scarred and blistered 
door flew open at the first impact of his knuckles as if 
by magic, and Elizabeth confronted him with a face that 
sharp suspicion and the darkest surmises rendered ter¬ 
rible to see. She had her shawl on, but no hat, and she 
waved the shining house-key in her withered hand with 
a tragic gesture of repudiation. 

“It’s no use!” she cried, in a shrill and vibrant voice. 
“I wean’t tek backword now. I’ve tekkn it once this 
week. I wean’t tek it a second time from Nobody. She 
said I was to come to-day, and I said I would, and 
Come I Will.” At which point, recognizing all at once 


THE DARK ANGEL 


337 


the form and features of the messenger through the dense 
emotions that had made her eyesight of small avail, she 
broke off with something like a sob, and propped her 
bosom with the door-key. 

“Master Oswald!” she exclaimed incredulously. “It’s 
you 1 What a fright you gied me.” 

Her thin lips writhed and trembled like blown straws, 
and the two attesting hands flung up to the level of her 
seared face were alive with agitation. 

“I was sure it was Burfords come to bring me back- 
word.” With which she made no effort to dissimulate 
her tears, for though she had been spared the confirma¬ 
tion of her worst forebodings, she had tasted—in the 
brevity of that moment—all its bitterness. “Foster’s 
gied me backword on Monday,” she told Oswald. “They 
sent lass to say they’d let me know when they should be 
wanting me again. Aye! After I’d gotten my break¬ 
fast and was stood wi’ my shawl on, an’ door-key in my 
hand, and basket on table, all ready to set off.” 

Thus far she had spoken in her tragic voice; the voice 
displaying awful tones, like vocal chasms and precipices; 
that dropped at times to cavernous intensity, and 
plumbed such Stygian depths as caused cold currents 
to creep down Oswald’s spine. All at once, however, 
her eye threw off its frenzy and she put the passion from 
her face as if it were a mask. The voice was almost 
honeyed that inquired of Oswald what had brought him 
at this early hour, though tragedy returned in force when 
she learned the motive of his visit. Come? Aye! 
Elizabeth would come at the call of his mother and of 
sickness, though a thousand Burfords stood between. 
Let Burfords give her backword if they cared, and be 
done with her. Not that she had any fear they would. 

“Burfords will let me off to-day,” she declared, with 
the fervour of conviction. “I know they will. They 


338 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


can’t help, when I say who it is, and what it’s for. And 
if they won’t . . . it’ll be all the same. Tell your 
mother I shall be up at your house as soon as I’ve had 
time to let Burfords know.” 

And true to her promise she tore up the street within 
ten minutes of Oswald’s return—having been all round 
by Rockery House in the meanwhile—at her customary 
breakneck pace between stumbling and flying; the frayed 
extremeties of her shawl beating the air like wings. 

“Oh, mum!” she cried, the instant she caught sight of 
Mrs. Holmroyd. “Whatever’s this! Why didn’t you 
send for me sooner! I could ’a come and sat up wi’ her 
last night after I’d got back from Tomlinson’s. I sat 
up a fortnight wi’ Mrs. Sharpies before she died, and 
never went to bed, and did my washing every day just 
same. It’s nothing’m. I’m used to it. If anything was 
to happen in this house I couldn’t bide to think that 
anybody else should be here at time but me. I shouldn’t 
forgive myself.” 

For her the cup of sickness held intoxicating proper¬ 
ties. She drank of it with gusto, as though it were sac¬ 
ramental wine. Its vintage warmed her, sent rapt and 
fiery currents through her blood. Dear to her heart 
though washings and spring-cleanings were, deathbeds 
and sick-chambers evoked her very soul. Such was the 
state of fervour they bestirred in her that her wasted 
body seemed a receptacle altogether too frail for the 
ecstatic forces rending it. No task however herculean 
daunted her enthusiasms; they boiled within her bosom, 
sustained by fires invisible and undwindling. Her in¬ 
satiable appetite for work and the zeal she brought to 
the doing of it dispelled something of the leaden atmos¬ 
phere of gloom that darkened Oswald’s heart, and 
brought back a gleam of ancient comfort to this altered 
home. The vital sound of water running into tilted pails, 


THE DARK ANGEL 


339 


the brisk manipulation of taps and opening of cupboard 
doors, the animated friction of steel fenders and fire- 
irons with cloths dipped in turpentine and rubbed on 
bathbrick tended in some mysterious fashion to remove 
the furrows from the gathered face of care. Oswald 
partook of a breakfast which Elizabeth prepared and 
set for him in the kitchen, in order that the parlour 
might be free at any moment for the doctor’s coming. 
The sunny brightness of the morning served to dissipate 
much of last night’s dread. By the time that Oswald 
had cleared his platter there crept into his troubled 
being an element of timid confidence and hope. He went 
into the garden and found a chastened joy in it. He 
peeped from the parlour window and perceived a street 
flooded with such sunshine as made him crimp his eyes. 
Surely . . . surely, with so much brightness and loveli¬ 
ness abroad; with so much in life to live for . . . hope’s 
curtains might be lifted. Things could not altogether 
be as dark as he had feared. 

But just as the school began to reassemble, and life 
appeared to be on the point of resuming its cheerful, 
customary features once again, the sunlight was extin¬ 
guished by the advent of the doctor, who drove up in 
his noiseless Victoria and strode gravely up the stair¬ 
case, bringing gloom and the hush of apprehensions back 
with him as if he were nocturnal dusk incarnate. Eliz¬ 
abeth, red-eyed and authoritative, subdued the assem¬ 
bling scholars with an uplifted finger on their entry, 
bidding each one of them in turn to “Hush! ... Be 
still! . . . Doctor’s i’ house.” Awed by the apparition, 
albeit with all their curiosities bestirred and emitting a 
bee-like murmur, they stole up the staircase striving with 
the futility of childhood to keep silence, and took their 
places in the schoolroom where Oswald dutifully seated 
himself as a pattern to behaviour. The presence of a 


340 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


doctor in the bedroom immediately adjoining the wall on 
which the varnished atlas hung impressed imagination 
powerfully, and drew more interest than the world map 
had ever done. That their little schoolmate Beryl, who 
had wept yesterday during the thunderstorm, lay now so 
near to them upon a bed of sickness was a tremendous fact 
infecting all with irrepressible excitement. They spoke in 
whispers, but their whispers were stridulous and penetrat¬ 
ing ; piercing sharp with eagerness and hope, and through 
such sympathies as children feel they revelled in the nov¬ 
elty of the situation, and welcomed each moment won 
from tasks and lesson-books; pointing to the progress 
of the clock’s hands with something like jubilation. 
Some of them bent ears towards the wall, eager to glean 
sounds of the slightest portent from the unseen world of 
happenings beyond; others slipped on tiptoe to the win¬ 
dow, to feed their hungry curiosities on the sight of the 
doctor’s carriage, and Oswald watched them in a state 
of curious remoteness, without a word. Steeped in the 
subdued babel of small voices and his own more personal 
concerns and speculations, a strange mist of unreality 
seemed to be creeping over life and him. His reasoning 
powers attested that this was not a dream in which he 
took so dim a part, and yet it bore in small respect the 
similitude of life. The voices all about him fell upon his 
ears with a quality of strangeness and familiar surprise, 
as if they had passed through a filter and were purified 
of all that made them real; the window looking out upon 
the street showed pretematurally clear; even through the 
ardent hum of conversation that made the schoolroom 
buzz like an insectarium, he was acutely conscious of 
the ticking of the schoolroom clock—a sound both in¬ 
timate and alien. That he should be sitting there in 
schooltime without his mother, without Beryl, was a cir- 


THE DARK ANGEL 


341 


cumstance so contrary to all experience as to border 
on the preposterous. For life itself is but a language, 
intelligible only when by long usage made familiar. The 
element of novelty can prove too much for comprehen¬ 
sions unprepared, like strange new words that take from 
speech all comfort and significance, and leave the hearer’s 
mind depressed with the consciousness of its inability to 
understand. Hours passed by, it seemed to Oswald, be¬ 
fore the schoolroom door opened and Mrs. Holmroyd 
appeared. There would be no school that day, she an¬ 
nounced to them. They were all to go home very quietly. 
Beryl was seriously ill. “It is nothing at all infectious,” 
she took care to impress upon her listeners. “Nothing 
that your parents need have the least fear of. You must 
be sure to tell them that. I will write, or send word by 
Oswald, when you are to come again.” 

Saying which, to Oswald’s deep dismay, she turned her 
face away with an abruptness of which he understood 
too well the cause, and retired as hastily as she had 
entered. 

The little school broke up forthwith, simmering under 
the force of its own suppressed excitement. It doffed 
its academic slippers and put on its outdoor shoes, and 
reclaimed its hats and mantles from the pegs upon the 
landing outside the schoolroom door—Oswald mutely 
assisting—and took its leave, eager to disseminate the 
news and impart to others its own wonder, and taste 
the full savour of its unlooked-for liberty. Beneath 
its mien of sadness Oswald sensed a fine elation eager 
to be gone. It pulled long faces and exclaimed: 
“Poor Beryl!” and asked those dreadful questions that 
youth for ever asks until it has been taught to check its 
impulses, and to wrap loin-cloths about its natural and 
naked sentiments. “Would Beryl get better?” “What 


342 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


would happen if she died?” “When my cousin Amy 
died,” the confectioner’s daughter confided, “Alice didn’t 
have to go back to school while the next term 1” 

Oswald participated in all these speculations with a 
sort of purged distress. Wistfully he watched them go. 
They waved their hands to him and cried: “Good-bye, 
Oswald,” and left him cheerfully to his solitude and dumb 
distress. Only the little Alice Rencil ran back to him as 
he was about to close the door and laid compassionating 
fingers on his sleeve. 

“Never mind, Oswald,” she said to him. “I will ask 
mother if you may come and play with me. Often. 
Until Beryl gets better.” 

The promise dropped like a lump of sugar into his 
bitter cup, causing its brimming wretchedness to over¬ 
flow. For such a promise, in the present hour of pain, 
seemed too sweet for fulfilment. It partook of the elusive 
loveliness of heaven; a felicity so remote and unattain¬ 
able as almost to mock the sorrow it aspires to lighten. 
For a while Oswald lingered on the doorstep, exchanging 
chastened handwaves with the receding figure of the or¬ 
ganist’s little daughter. Then, slowly and reluctantly, 
he shut out the pleasant prospect of the sunlit world 
and retired to the sadness of his soul’s solitude; to the 
deep depression of this altered home. So changed, 
indeed, were all its features, so abstracted, dark and ret¬ 
icent the look it wore, that he seemed rather to be a 
stranger within strange walls than Oswald Holmroyd. 
A new life was sprung into being, in which he had no 
part. He was an outsider who haunted the outskirts of 
unseen happenings, as—in days agone—he had hovered 
about the fringe of crowds surrounding some dread Thing 
in front of the Infirmary gates. Sounds frightened him; 
of approaching footsteps he was grown afraid; almost 
did he live in dread of the moment when next he must 


THE DARK ANGEL 


343 


encounter Elizabeth’s red eyes, or undergo the searching 
ordeal of his mother’s face. He crept into the parlour 
as quietly as could be, and hid there. A great desire 
for righteousness possessed him. From the book cup¬ 
board he drew the big Bible, that needed both his hands 
to lift. Its sheer avoirdupois seemed to dispense com¬ 
fort to hearts like his in trouble. He spread the sacred 
tome upon his knee, and deeming every single portion 
of the Word of God contained in it to be equally ac¬ 
ceptable to its Author and efficacious in the hour of sor¬ 
row, began dutifully with the First Chapter of Genesis: 
“In the Beginning . . . God created Heaven, and 
Earth. . . 


4 

Through all this mass of dark and doleful memory one 
recollection shone for Oswald Holmroyd and his mother 
like clear, consolatory starlight. That was the unim¬ 
aginable kindness dispensed by the Organist of St. Sav¬ 
iour’s and his wife. 

Within an hour, indeed, of the school’s disbandment 
Mrs. Rencil knocked softly at the door of the little house 
in Spring Bank Gardens, drawn there by the purest feel¬ 
ings of friendship and concern. 

“Is there anything at all . . she enquired of Mrs. 
Holmroyd when the first words of sympathy had been 
exchanged, “. . . in which we can be of the least help 
to you? Is there anything required for the sick-room 
which perhaps we might be able to lend? ... Or special 
food, which we could prepare for you at home? In¬ 
valids always think so much more of dishes that are 
brought to them! And you will have so many claims 
upon your time. Both my husband and I would feel so 


344 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


happy if you would allow us to be of some real assistance 
to you . . . however small.” 

The proposal was reinforced with tones and looks that 
left no doubt of the fullness of its sincerity, and in such 
a solemn hour kindness much less than this would have 
caused Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude to break down. 
“There was nothing,” she said through tears, “which at 
present she stood in need of—more than the wonderful 
sympathy which had just been shown. It was a great 
comfort to her to be assured of that, and to know,—in 
the event of real necessity—which way to turn for help.” 
But the Organist’s wife was not yet at the end of her 
proposal. 

“Arthur suggested . . .” she said, “that perhaps it 
might relieve you of some of your difficulty if we were 
to take charge of Oswald for you during this very trying 
time.” She was thinking, as Mrs. Holmroyd knew, of 
Oswald’s little bedplace reachable through the sick-room. 
“I wish you would allow us to do so. We could accom¬ 
modate him so easily; he would be no trouble at all. He 
could sleep in our small spare bedroom, and have his 
meals with us . . . and come to see you each day, or as 
often as you wished him to.” 

At first, though a surge of gratitude swept between 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart and lips, and her thankfulness 
could only cry: “How can I ever thank you!”—a wave 
of consternation swept her also, at the thought of sepa¬ 
ration from her son in an hour when she felt such two¬ 
fold need of him. But she thought too, of his little 
sleeping place beyond the room where Beryl lay, and 
realized that it could continue to be his sleeping place 
no more until this shadow lifted. And the problem of 
her son’s disposal troubled Mrs. Holmroyd even as she 
sought reasons to justify her keeping of him. She un¬ 
derstood his disposition well enough to know how much, 


THE DARK ANGEL 


345 


for all his resolute assertions, the dreadful isolation of 
removal to an upper room would cost him, destitute of 
all furniture save his own small bed; withdrawn from 
every companionship if, through need or fear, he raised 
his voice to solicit of the night one reassuring word. 
True, there was the empty schoolroom. She might 
have lodged him there, close by the wall. But even 
whilst she pondered in Mrs. Rencil’s presence how best 
his bed might be disposed, her conscience rose up and 
reproached her. “It is my own selfish feelings I am seeking 
to consider,” she said within herself. “Not his.” More¬ 
over, despite the deep trouble she was in, her mother’s 
pride responded to such a genuine evidence of interest 
on his behalf, affirming—as it did—not only the great 
kindness of these friends, but the merit of her son. Who 
was to say that providence had no part in this proposal? 
And of a sudden, suffused with a great blind faith that 
was prepared to put its trust in any wisdom other than 
her own, she concurred with gratitude in the project of 
his going. “I had already been wondering,” she told 
her visitor, “. . . what was to be done with Oswald. The 
house is so small. And I fear it will be but a sad home 
for him . . . during the next few days.” 

Thus it befell that Oswald Holmroyd set off that same 
afternoon in company with Mrs. Rencil and her little 
daughter to the organist’s house in Hill Street, carry¬ 
ing his nightshirt and necessaries in a canvas satchel, 
and the deep sadness that was in him received the un¬ 
expected setting of a golden frame. It seemed to him 
he was no longer Oswald Holmroyd in the flesh, but the 
soul of disembodied sorrow that floated in an atmosphere 
of love; permeated through and through with a quality 
of human kindliness whose ambient warmth pertained 
to the divine. Looks, tones, gestures—all—within this 
new enchanted world—were softened to besuit the soul 


346 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of sorrow. Every thought and act of kindness converged 
in Oswald. Alice brought all her playthings to lay 
as an offering on the altar of his sadness, Mrs. Rencil 
lulled his sense of strangership with the sweetest of smiles 
and voices. The Organist himself laid on Oswald’s shoul¬ 
der a hand so warm, compassionate and kindly, as 
brought into Oswald’s throat a lump of unswallowable af¬ 
fection. Think! Standing on the broad balcony of 
the Organist’s drawing-room, immersed in a flood of glori¬ 
fied Hill Street sunlight—that was infinitely richer, 
warmer and more golden than the sunlight allocated to 
Spring Bank Gardens—he could survey the whole length 
of the High Gate as far as the Mansion House. From 
this impressive vantage point—surely the supreme pin¬ 
nacle of human ambition—alike he could see and be seen. 
He could look down with pride and unimaginable con¬ 
descension on upturned faces that looked (wdth no small 
envy of his elevation) at him. He could watch the music- 
cases come and go, that grew into visibility from every 
conceivable quarter of the horizon, and converged with 
the inevitableness of destiny upon this house of houses. 
Not only so, but on occasions he was even deputed to run 
downstairs and give admission to such recent pupils as 
still retained a diffidence about opening with their own 
hands the Organist’s door. Scales and five-finger exer¬ 
cises and the hourly sound of stammering sonatas were 
the very essence of the enchanted air he breathed. He 
drew them all into his lungs along with the more won¬ 
drous music that Arthur Rencil made with his own hands, 
and all Oswald’s pulses became musicians, meting out his 
eager blood in bars. Nor was his part in music confined 
alone to what he heard. During such intervals as the 
Organist’s teaching-room was empty Oswald was set to 
practice with a whimsical severity that utilized this 


THE DARK ANGEL 


347 


method of distracting the boy’s mind from thoughts of 
the shadow of home. 

“Oswald, you scamp! What’s this! You’ve only had 
half an hour’s work. How do you expect to be able to 
take the Service for me next Sunday, at this rate! Quick. 
Get into the music-room with you, and don’t you dare to 
give up counting or to take your fingers off the keys 
until my next pupil comes—whether he comes to-night or 
to-morrow afternoon!” 

Then, too, Oswald was constituted the proud bearer 
of Arthur Rencil’s messages, hastening to this house or 
to that; to the music shop in High Gate for music paper; 
and to the iron-monger’s for fret-saws and brass hinges; 
and to Prestwich’s for the church keys; and to Canon 
Quexley’s in respect of hymns for Sunday. Walks, too, 
with Mrs. Rencil and her little daughter Oswald took; 
and now and then the drawing-room resounded with the 
most heavenly of games—in which the Organist of St. 
Saviour’s did not disdain to take his part. And little 
Alice Rencil held up her face to Oswald when at night 
she went to bed, and put her arms about his neck, and 
Oswald’s lips encountered soft, warm lips that might 
have been his sister Beryl’s lips—save in respect to the 
effect they had upon him. For these lips, whispering his 
own name as they kissed him, set all his prides on fire 
and filled him at the same time with sadness and confu¬ 
sion. Oh! if only Beryl had been well! If only she and 
his mother might have shared with him these hours of 
seraphic happiness, what more could he—or they—have 
asked of life? After every bout of mirth and laughter 
Oswald dutifully dimmed the brightness in his bosom and 
thought with conscientious sorrow of his little sister, and 
the debt incalculable he owed her sickness; these joys 
she could not share. For life, in such a magic setting, 


348 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


was not lived—but dreamed. He drew it effortlessly 
through his enchanted senses like breath through the lips. 
Time, for Oswald, ceased to be. Whole ages he abode 
in the Organist’s house in Hill Street; whole ages, that 
is to say, measured by the emotions, albeit—measured 
by the clock—they were but moments; a night; a day; 
a few brief mortal hours; no more; perishable hours of 
imperishable memory, dying like flesh and blood and sigh¬ 
ing out their happiness like souls at last into the eternal 
void. Such was the bright atmosphere of love encom¬ 
passing him here that gradually he lost thought of those 
shadows elsewhere deepening. When it is still day with 
us we find it hard to realize that in other latitudes the 
night has fallen. Away from the little house in Spring 
Bank Gardens, remote from the world of anxious whis¬ 
pers, hushed footsteps and fear-worn faces, his youthful 
hopes revived. Surely, with such invariable, kindly eyes 
and smiling lips and reassuring voices, there was no cause 
to feel alarm. The worst was over; the best was soon 
to be. Before long, Beryl would be his laughing, gleeful 
sister once again. She and his mother would come to 
join him in this house of gladness. He began to recon¬ 
sider his first terrors with magnanimity and mild con¬ 
tempt, as he thought, at times, of pennies foolishly ex¬ 
pended in his days of youth on baubles that a later wis¬ 
dom scorned. 

. . . And then, of a sudden, the life about him dark¬ 
ened like a blue sky when from nowhere, in no time at all, 
the black clouds rise and swallow it. He heard the house- 
bell ring a peal that made assurance sicken. His 
startled intuitions stirred in him like leaves when the 
storm’s first gust assails them. He sat at the piano¬ 
forte in the teaching-room, playing five-finger exercises 
with his whole heart, and counting in his bravest, clear¬ 
est voice for Arthur Rencil and all the world to hear; 


THE DARK ANGEL 


349 


but that sharp peal silenced his counting and stopped 
his fingers stock-still upon the keys. It went through 
his bosom with a swift pain, with an indescribable emo¬ 
tion such as he had experienced that evening in the chan¬ 
cel at St. Saviour’s when the passing bell rang out its 
apostrophic note for the dead alderman, and he and the 
choir had held their breath to listen, and hearts delayed 
their beat. It might have been anybody who rang at 
the Organist’s door, but a sharp, dread certitude within 
him affirmed this was not Anybody. He heard the blend 
of voices down below, that might have been discussing 
anything; but again the sharp, dread certitude within 
him proclaimed this was not Anything. It was Some¬ 
thing. Something that concerned him very closely, 
deeply, terribly. One of these voices, he had made sure 
(for all he could not hear it) was the voice of Elizabeth. 
Another of the voices was the voice of Mrs. Rencil, for 
this he heard distinctly. It cried: “Alice, dear! . . . 
Come here awhile ... I want you.” And then his 
trembling intuitions were filled with every sort of sound 
inaudible to any hearing but that of a blanched and 
speechless terror. Sounds of movement; of doors open¬ 
ing and closing; of footsteps hastening in quest of him. 
Aye! in quest of him. In quest of Oswald Holmroyd. 
And such was his terror, such his certitude, that he had 
no courage, power or inclination to dissimulate. He 
could not count one beat or strike one single key to hide 
the fear he felt. He could only sit with impotent 
dropped wrists and his face turned over his shoulder in 
the direction of the door behind him that he knew in¬ 
evitably must open. 

It opened, as his fears divined, and Arthur Rencil 
came into the room. The accustomed smile upon his face 
was gone, absorbed into the solemnity of a great com¬ 
passion; withdrawn to an illimitable distance (it seemed 


350 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to Oswald) as if the Organist gazed down upon him 
with tenderness and sorrow from some infinite high place; 
from the sky; from heaven. 

. . Oswald!” he said, and that voice of dreadful, 
undermining softness swept away from the listener his 
last hope, hi>s last fortitude. “I am afraid that you will 
have to give up your practice for this morning . . . 
and go home. Your mother has just sent for you. . . 

The gentle voice spoke on, but Oswald heard no more. 
As by a lightning stroke the veil of illusory happiness 
was rent in twain. Beyond, where he had deemed life’s 
sunlight still to be, was naught but a void of pitchy 
darkness and despair. He dropped his face upon the 
compassionating arm that the Organist put around him, 
and poured out the wretchedness of his soul in such tears 
as he had never shed before. 


BOOK IX 


THE CHOICE 

1 

I F human souls in sickness could have the food they 
pine for, Mrs. Holmroyd would have taken Beryl to 
the grave in distant Clothton where the child’s 
father lay. But the harsh voice of economy forbade. 
And though she tortured sorrow unavailingly to find 
some means by which its wishes might be met, she was 
loth, too, to part with the little daughter whom death 
had snatched so violently from her arms. More than 
ever now she felt the need of her. She yearned for the 
comfort of the child’s companionship; for the knowledge 
that Beryl slept not too far from her mother’s care. 
That she might open her window and draw comfort from 
the thought that the breeze which came to her was the 
same that had kissed and sweetened her little daughter’s 
grave. She did not blind conscience entirely to the self¬ 
ishness of her desires in this. Nay, conscience bitterly 
upbraided her at moments with grudging Beryl to the 
child’s dead father, and she owned the dreadful justice 
of the accusation; but economy triumphed over irresolu¬ 
tion at last, and lent her mother’s selfishness a seemly 
cloak for what it did. She realized that it was the voice 
of stern necessity to which she hearkened, and not the 
voice of selfish interest alone, and Beryl was laid to rest 
in the green churchyard of St. Saviour’s, beneath the 
golden iris of the clock that kept perpetual watch upon 
the child’s sleep, on the sun-side of the western door. 
Her death, and the costs of her interment, brought 
351 


352 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


terror appreciably closer to the house in Spring Bank 
Gardens. For the little school had been broken up, and 
schools—once their precarious life is interrupted—sicken 
with almost a human facility and sink into decline. Par¬ 
ents seem to entertain a prejudice against letting their 
children reassemble too quickly beneath a roof which 
Death has visited. And scholars show no eagerness to 
recommence the studies from which providence has so 
mercifully freed them. And, truth to tell, for all she 
strove to set her school afoot once more, with a veiled 
desperation that tried to counteract the dreadful apathy 
she felt, Mrs. Holmroyd had no heart for teaching; no 
heart for pies; no heart for anything but undisturbed 
communion with her own sorrow. All else seemed vain 
and secular, a very sacrilege of the grief so recently sus¬ 
tained. And Beryl’s death had, as it were, awakened 
her with violence to the pious mockery of this life she 
lived; this frail, precarious life she led so earnestly and 
with such monstrous confidence. A cloud of illusions 
died with her little daughter. A curtain had been torn 
aside between herself and life’s realities, and the dread¬ 
ful thinness of its texture was revealed. Ideals were 
not attainable through power of themselves, her disillu¬ 
sioned grief affirmed, but by the power of harder, baser 
things. Aspirations were but ends; not means. Steps 
of the heart’s desire alone take no man nearer heaven; 
they must be built of stouter stuff; of brick; of stone; 
of anything that gives the stumbling foot a hold. And 
Oswald, through this loss so recently sustained, and 
through the dire uncertainty of life disclosed by it, grew 
doubly dear . . . doubly necessary and precious to her. 
He must be saved. He must be saved at all cost for 
the fulfilment of the great ideal embodied in him. Des¬ 
perately she cast eyes on every side to seek the means 
of safety for her son, and found—to her dismay—no 


THE CHOICE 353 

place of any likelihood for them to rest on save the broad 
figure of Councillor Burford. 

Since that fateful Saturday evening when he had called 
to put his fortune to the test, the Councillor had paid 
no further visit to the house in Spring Bank Gardens. 
Oswald, and the little Beryl before she died, were wont 
to listen for the once familiar footfall in vain; and Mrs. 
Holmroyd for her secret’s sake had made believe to listen 
too, lifting up her head with theirs and simulating a 
conviction falsified when the step passed by. Nor was 
this silence broken when death cast his shadow over Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s house. Neither the Councillor nor his 
daughter vouchsafed any word or sign of sympathy in 
that first dark hour when most she needed it. From the 
Rencils every imaginable kindness flowed: flowers for the 
room where Beryl lay; a wreath to place upon her tiny 
coffin and mitigate the cruelty of its shape. Kindness! 
Oh, kindness in sufficiency to open every portal of her 
soul. Before they sealed the sleeping countenance from 
sight for ever, Mrs. Rencil called and laid the softest 
kiss upon the child’s cheek, turning from this to clasp 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s hand in tearful, voiceless sympathy. 
If anything had helped to sustain Mrs. Holmroyd’s belief 
in the unshakable goodness of God during this sad hour, 
surely it was the human goodness of these friends, whose 
human sympathy kindled the divine, and seemed to light 
for her a lamp in heaven. 

But the house on the Hunmouth Road gave no ac¬ 
knowledgment of the loss she had sustained; breathed no 
word of condolence. And yet, Miss Burford at least 
could plead no ignorance of the dark event befallen, for 
Elizabeth had been constrained to sue for leave of absence 
from the Councillor’s daughter on the morning that 
Oswald took his mother’s message to her door. The 
leave of absence had been granted, it is true, though not 


354 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


(if Elizabeth’s indiscreet recountal could be credited) too 
graciously. “It was very awkward” (Miss Burford had 
declared) “and she wished to goodness people wouldn’t 
go and fall ill right on her washday. There were seven 
days in the week. Surely, with a little contrivance, they 
might have picked some other day for That!” 

This unkind comment on Miss Burford’s part—itself 
providing such a commentary on the speaker—and the 
determined silence that succeeded it, wounded Mrs. Holm- 
royd’s sorrow to the quick. In her heart there grew a 
secret grievance against the Councillor and his daughter. 
Lit by the contrasting kindness of the Rencils their con¬ 
duct cast a shadow deep and cruel. For herself she had 
no heed, but this lack of feeling shown towards her dead 
child seemed almost too great for pardon. Many times 
the Councillor had sat with Beryl at her table, accepting 
such small hospitality as lay in Mrs. Holmroyd’s power 
to set before him; and now, in the hour of overwhelming 
sorrow, he had no word or sign of sympathy to offer 
her. Her outraged grief touched almost a degree of 
scorn for the unworthiness on which her friendship had 
been in the past so misbestowed. And when, three days 
after the sad function at St. Saviour’s, she heard with 
Oswald the familiar footstep in the street, succeeded by 
the customary rap upon the parlour door, and the spa¬ 
cious figure of Councillor Burford pushed its way apolo¬ 
getically into her room: “Are you there, ma’am?” . . . 
she received the tardy visitor with sorrowful reserve. 
The Councillor’s broad shoulders and blunt crowned hat 
—whose removal, as of old, constituted his last conces¬ 
sion to politeness when he stood upon the hearthrug— 
and the overpowering atmosphere of worldly business 
which he brought in with him, unbreathable by sorrow’s 
finer lungs, stirred Mrs. Holmroyd to a feeling almost of 
resentment, as for an undesired intrusion. For he took 


THE CHOICE 


355 


his stand as he had always stood; held his hat in front of 
him as he had always held it; looked round the room 
with an eye that seemed to betray no consciousness of 
the awful change wrought in it since the occasion of his 
last visit. And his first words when he faced Mrs. Holm- 
royd from the hearthrug: “Well, ma’am. And how’s 
things going with you?” hurt her terribly with their in¬ 
eptness and inadequacy. For a while she could do no 
more than bow her head and murmur “Thank you . . .,” 
too deeply wounded to come to closer quarters with such 
a question. But in the silence that ensued she was moved 
after a moment to add the quiet intimation for her dead 
child’s sake: “Ours—perhaps you have heard—has been 
a house of great sorrow . . . since you were here last, 
Mr. Burford,”—for the Councillor’s attitude and silence 
caused her for a space to wonder whether, after all, he 
could be acquainted with the fact of her trouble. His 
answer quickly set the doubt at rest. 

“So I’ve been given to understand, ma’am,” he said. 
“It’ll have been a trying time for you.” He came no 
closer to condolence than that; his words possessed no 
greater power of assimilation with fine sorrow than his 
own broad person, but now that Mrs. Holmroyd had 
opened for him this dark subject of such difficulty, he 
entered it with promptitude, as one who had only been 
awaiting an invitation given. 

“In fact . . .” he said, “it’s that, as much as any¬ 
thing, that’s brought me round this afternoon, ma’am.” 
He confessed with burly frankness that the visit was 
perhaps belated, and in his own prosaic way expressed 
regret, saying it wouldn’t have been amiss if he’d come 
a bit sooner (he knew) than what he did, and as a mat¬ 
ter of fact it had been in his mind a day or two. But 
he hadn’t wanted to intrude on her at a time like that, 
when she might be forgiven for preferring her own com- 


356 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


pany to his. Had Annie wrote to her? She hadn’t? 
No, he thought she hadn’t. It wouldn’t have hurt her 
if she had ha’ done. But Mrs. Holmroyd knew how it 
was at their house. Always that amount of cleaning 
to be done. And besides, his daughter wasn’t over and 
above fond of using the pen. She never had been, all 
her life. “She’s not same as you, ma’am,—always able 
to find the right word at the right time, whether it’s to 
be wrote or spoke. Letter-writing costs her a deal of 
trouble, and never seems to leave her in a particular good 
temper when it’s done.” All the same (he owned) she 
might have called on Mrs. Holmroyd and spared him the 
necessity. “She’s got a deal more time than me, and sym¬ 
pathy’s more a woman’s business than a man’s. Not 
that I haven’t felt sympathy with you, ma’am,” he has¬ 
tened to assure her. “I have. I’ve felt a great deal. 
In fact ... I venture to think there’s nobody in 
Daneborough that’s felt sorrier for what’s took place 
than me.” 

Compared with the ineffable, fine kindness of the 
Rencils such sympathy was blundering and crude. And 
yet there showed a character of blunt sincerity about 
both man and words that touched Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart 
despite herself, and softened her remorsefully with a con¬ 
sciousness of late misjudgment. For it was plain the 
Councillor had come this afternoon to offer her a troubled 
sympathy which he lacked lips or skill to utter. And 
sorrow must have food. The constrained crumbs he 
dropped so awkwardly she took with gratitude, as for 
her dead child’s sake. All thoughts, all words, all trib¬ 
utes directed to that cherished memory were—to Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s heart—like a prolongation of the life with¬ 
drawn; like bridges thrown out to span the chasm be¬ 
tween them. Little by little, as they spoke, the feeling 
of estrangement ebbed away. It was no longer an ob- 


THE CHOICE 


357 


trusive stranger who stood upon her hearthrug, bringing 
the materiality of a harsh and alien world into the 
sacred universe of sorrow. It was a familiar figure of 
much friendship, linked by unbreakable association with 
the dead. At this very table he had sat—how many 
times!—with Beryl in the past. How many times had 
Beryl lifted up her eager voice to announce his coming. 
“Listen! . . . He’s there. I can hear him . . . ever 
so far away.” 

Of the fact of their last eventful interview in this 
room but little memory survived, and that of small em¬ 
barrassment. For Mrs. Holmroyd the intervention of 
a great sorrow had made every recollection pale save the 
bitterness of recent days. She asked at length—for the 
cloth was laid, and the board spread, and the Councillor’s 
eyes roved perpetually over the table as he talked—if 
she might offer him a cup of tea. He had not come for 
that (he said) and should be sorry to intrude upon her 
privacy . . . but still . . . And sat down, as of old, in 
the easy chair that Oswald placed for him. 

“It makes a strange difference to a table,” he com¬ 
mented, “when anybody’s took from it so sudden. I 
can see the difference with my own eyes, and I don’t 
need to be told what a difference you'll see, ma’am.” He 
bit into his teacake with an amplitude that seemed, in 
some sort, to attest the measure of the spaciousness of 
his regret. 

He stayed an hour, and by the time he took his leave 
the old intimacy had been re-established. Both Mrs. 
Holmroyd and Oswald were sorry when he rose at last, 
and felt their loneliness intensified when the room was 
void of his big, reassuring presence, and they heard their 
visitor’s firm footsteps fading down the street. 

“I shall perhaps take the liberty to call and see you 
again, some time soon, ma’am,” were his concluding words 


358 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


on leaving, and Mrs. Holmroyd thanked him for the token 
of his friendliness with real gratitude in heart. 

2 

Councillor Burford kept his word. Before two days 
had passed he paid a second visit to the house of mourn¬ 
ing in Spring Bank Gardens. Thereafter his visits re¬ 
sumed their old frequency. Within a month of Beryl’s 
death and burial he sought occasion to repeat his fate¬ 
ful Saturday night’s offer—choosing this time a more 
auspicious day—and Mrs. Holmroyd had neither heart 
nor courage to say No in all its nakedness. Indeed, from 
the first day of the resumption of his visits—divining to 
what end they must inevitably lead—she had been plead¬ 
ing with her prejudices to think more kindly of this big, 
broad-shouldered man. Since marriage without some 
pious counterfeit of real affection was, to her, an act 
unthinkable, she had essayed to set her suitor’s qualities 
in the kindest light for Oswald’s sake. Could she indeed 
(she asked herself) reject an honourable proposal that 
signified so much to her son’s future? Had she, even 
at a time like this, the right to study her own feelings 
before the larger considerations of his welfare? Nay, 
her troubled conscience seemed to cry; if she had but 
sacrificed those feelings sooner, who knows if Beryl might 
not have been with them still. Horrified by which 
thought, and hushed by the recent lesson of her loss, she 
strove to see attractiveness in the figure of her frequent 
guest; to endue his form with dignity and his character 
with worth. 

The most awful thing to bear in this was the sense of 
her disloyalty to the dead. Not less than Oswald’s good¬ 
ness and ability, and the boy’s ultimate advancement 
in the world, had her self-devotion to the memory of his 


THE CHOICE 


359 


dead father been part of the Ideal. She had never dur¬ 
ing all her widowhood entertained the thought of super¬ 
seding his memory with a living husband. But now, for 
Oswald’s sake must this personal ideal of hers be 
shattered. Henceforth the great Ideal lay with her son. 
Her only part in it, the only contribution she could 
render was sacrifice. 

To make herself the wife of such a husband—with so 
high a standard of true husbandship in heart—was for 
her a bitter step to take. No woman knew less of the 
sordid practices of snobbery than Mrs. Holmroyd. Her 
heart protested kinship with all the world; sympathy with 
the lowliest; respect, tenderness, affection, even, for all 
flesh that bore the impress of its Maker and partook of 
the sacrament of sorrow. In consenting to be the wife of 
Councillor Burford it was not that she felt a personal 
degradation; it was the degradation of something higher 
than herself that tortured her; it was the deliberate 
lowering of standards exalted by the spirit; standards 
that held her, in somewise, closer to God. She, who had 
known and loved the best of husbands, was accepting 
now—or preparing to accept—one who was unworthy to 
be named with him. Thought on in that way, with every 
emotion, every aspiration in revolt, she cried: “I can¬ 
not. I could not. ... It is dreadful to think of.” But 
when she set against this her coming dire necessity—for 
soon the slender resources which had been her stronghold 
up to the present, must be exhausted—and asked what 
then was to become of Oswald . . . she turned back to 
her self-schooling with haste and horror. 

Ah! this sad task of re-teaching the affections; this 
melancholy school in which her feelings were constrained 
to mingle with thoughts unworthy of them, and to learn 
from the soiled pages of a mercenary primer. Prayers 
entered into it too. On her knees she prayed for the 


360 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


requisite humbleness of spirit, for such light from heaven 
as should blind her to the earthly fact of what she did, 
and lend her conduct higher sanctity. She implored her 
dead husband’s forgiveness for the act contemplated. It 
was (she told him) for their son’s sake. It was (she 
told him) for the rehabilitation of his good name, which 
she held more sacred than her own. And in this tor¬ 
mented state of mind she had surrendered whilst there 
was still a modicum of free-will left to her, and she might 
be able to avoid at least the last shame of financial 
necessity. 

She gave way with many reservations. Oh, many 
reservations that a stricken conscience imposed on her. 
She strove in all things to be honest to her future hus¬ 
band. She professed no deceptive depth of love. She 
told the Councillor that she had loved once, and for ever. 
But she owned to being touched by his faith in her, and 
if he believed that she was such a wife as could make him 
happy, she would loyally do her best to justify his trust. 
Scrupulously though she hedged her heart the answer 
given sufficed for Councillor Burford. It caused his 
businesslike exterior to soften visibly with the emotion of 
a desire attained, an aspiration gratified. His voice be¬ 
came unsteady; there crept even a moisture about his 
eyes. He affirmed: “I’m not a man to make promises, 
ma’am. I’m plain and outspoken . . . but I venture to 
think you won’t have no occasion to regret your choice.” 
His pride, in its simplicity, was almost childlike; it tended 
to disclose those trumpery vanities which a stern busi¬ 
ness frontage had hitherto kept hidden. Something of 
self-complacency began to show in him. He “ventured to 
think” this and that, in regard to Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
decision, which he characterized as “very sensible and 
wise, ma’am.” She would be a happy woman. Why, he 
might go so far as to say “a proud woman”—or his name 


THE CHOICE 


361 


would not be Burford. She would have a comfortable 
home, free of care or anxiety as to the future. And one 
day, all being well, she might count on being Mayoress 
of this important Borough (which he always pronounced 
“Borrow”). “It’s not every woman in Daneborough that 
can look forward to that ma’am.” Such a culminating 
promise of publicity was, to be sure, the last thing Mrs. 
Holmroyd had foreseen or sought and the sudden pros¬ 
pect shocked her not a little. To pass through mar¬ 
riage into a stage of domestic extinction for Oswald’s 
sake had marked the limit of what she had allowed her¬ 
self to contemplate. But she strove courageously to 
make her face reflect, although with faint success, her 
future husband’s pride, and for the rest resigned herself 
to every item of the long sacrifice imposed on her. 

3 

Not the least bitter was the visit that Miss Burford 
paid her, one afternoon, in the official character of pro¬ 
spective daughter-in-law. 

She called unexpectedly, breathing hard, with the chill 
animosity of an East Wind; her lips compressed; her eye 
bright and keen; a tiny flame of colour burning omi¬ 
nously on each cheek bone. She had come (she let it 
instantly be understood) at her father’s instigation, and 
led by no desire of her own. Her father had only deigned 
to acquaint her with his intentions a week ago. She had 
heard tales, of course. Under the circumstances that 
was only to be expected. But she had never, no, she 
had never dreamed! It had come quite as a . . . sur¬ 
prise to her. “Shock” was obviously the word she had 
intended to employ, but Mrs. Holmroyd’s altered face 
averted its employment. It was plain to see that the Coun¬ 
cillor’s daughter smouldered with desire to mortify her 


362 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


foe, but there were limits which a studied insolence must 
keep—or fail completely of its mark. At her father’s 
age, of course, (she said) it seemed ridiculous—to 
Her!—that he should ever dream of getting married 
again. But there was no reasoning with him. He was 
not easy to get on with. Far from it. Still . . . “I’m 
only his daughter,” she exclaimed with bitterness. “I’m 
nobody. No. Not more than the hearthrug.” She in¬ 
dicated the worn hearthrug contemptuously with the fer¬ 
ule of her umbrella, and the hand that gripped it shook. 
“Well! I hope you will be satisfied. It will be a great 
change of life for you . . . after this.” 

Her sentiments were curbed by a visible and powerful 
restraint that checked at the last moment the almost 
spoken words upon her lips, constantly replacing these 
with others less offensive in sound, though not in inten¬ 
tion. All the while she spoke she sat bolt upright upon 
her chair, breathing so fiercely that her sentences were 
interrupted often by the compressed feelings through 
which they had to fight their way. As for Mrs. Holm- 
royd, the suddenness of her adversary’s attack deprived 
her for awhile of the least power of speech or action. 
She could only sit in silence, void of any weapon with 
which to defend herself against Miss Burford’s rancour, 
even had she possessed the will to do so. For, of a 
dreadful truth, she knew herself to be what Miss Bur- 
ford’s indignation chose to paint her: an interloper, a 
usurper, prepared to take possession of a home on no 
better title than the infatuation of a parent. Yet she 
could not sit and suffer tacitly insinuations whose utter¬ 
ance made her conduct, even to herself, show viler than 
it was. If not in words, at least in manner, Miss Bur- 
ford charged her: 

“You have brought this about. You are responsible. 
Don’t tell me my father would ever have dreamed of marry- 


THE CHOICE 


363 


ing again if you had not schemed to put the idea into 
his head.” 

“I little thought,” the Councillor’s daughter declared, 
“what it was going to mean to me when you called that 
morning with your family to bring back my father’s 
solitaire. From the moment you put foot in the house” 
she could not control the shaft—“my home has never 
been the same. \ ou have altogether changed my father 
and not for the better. He has become quite another 
man.” 

Driven at last by such a thrust as this to take defen¬ 
sive measures for her own dignity, Mrs. Holmroyd 
interposed: 

“I am deeply distressed, Miss Burford, to think I 
should ever be an innocent cause of trouble to ... to 
anybody. But it is only due to myself to tell you that 
nothing was further from my thoughts in the first in¬ 
stance. I have been not less troubled, and surprised by 
the course of events—than you.” 

“Oh, to be sure!” Miss Burford tossed her head. “It 
is only natural you should say so.” 

“I am betraying no confidence,” Mrs. Holmroyd con¬ 
tinued, “when I tell you that at first . . . indeed, for 
a long while, I gave your father’s proposal no encourage¬ 
ment.” Miss Burford sniffed superciliously, as much as 
to emphasize the phrases “at first” and “for a long 
w T hile,” with feminine contempt. Every fibre of her body 
was resistant, and before such an uncompromising atti¬ 
tude Mrs. Holmroyd felt the dismal helplessness of her 
position. Too loyal to her own ideal of truth to pro¬ 
fess to this woman that she had subscribed to dictates of 
the heart alone in marrying Miss Burford’s father, she 
seemed to be left without a cause to plead. Nay, shame 
would have deterred her from seeking refuge in a plea 
which wronged so dreadfully her better self and judg- 


364 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ment. And yet a grosser shame deterred her from con¬ 
fession of the truth that, in such a sacred region of 
the character as this, she was an opportunist, sacrificing 
herself to Councillor Burford for the worldly advantages 
which this loveless union with him secured. In two re¬ 
spects her tongue was tied, and without a voice to speak 
for her she had the bitter consciousness of being inex¬ 
tricably crushed between honesty and imposture: unable 
to gain justification from the heart or advocacy from 
the head. That Miss Burford divined the weakness of 
her adversary’s cause was evident, for she made of Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s halfhearted protestations her footstool. 
Reassured by the submissive meekness of the lips that 
sped no verbal darts against her own, she strengthened 
her attack. The mockery of her visit was unmasked. 
She had come, an ostensible emissary of peace, bearing 
words of implacable hostility and hate; her bosom rose 
as she spoke; the heat mounted to her cheeks, the venom 
to her tongue. Her message of goodwill became an in¬ 
dictment: every word of it a poisoned arrow. She did 
not know what had possessed her father. To go and 
do a thing like this, with everybody crying shame on 
him! Well! Mrs. Holmroyd had had her way. She 
would soon rule in a house that Miss Burford’s life had 
been wasted in preparing for her. All these years . . . 
Miss Burford had toiled and moiled and worn herself to 
the bone—for This! Let Mrs. Holmroyd rest easy in 
her conscience if she could! 

... Nor did the tirade end here. There were other 
things more dreadful that she said, and that Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd listened to—for the Councillor’s daughter, casting 
prudence to the wind, uncorked the flask of wrath and 
drenched her adversary with its vitriol. 

“I have had to put up with my father all these years. 
He is not an easy man to get on with—as you will find 


THE CHOICE 


365 


out to jour consternation before long. You don’t know 
him as 1 do. He is an obstinate, stubborn man who 
will go his own way. Yes, and rather go the wrong way 
of his own choosing than take the right way when any¬ 
body else points it out to him. And now . . . just be¬ 
cause of a woman he has known only a few months. 
Know ? Why, when I say ‘know’ I mean, he knows noth¬ 
ing at all about ... I am to be turned out of my own 
house like a dog. Me. His own daughter. To make 
way for you and your son.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd half rose with a protesting: “Oh no! 
Oh no, Miss Burford . . .” 

“I say ‘Yes,’ ” Miss Burford threw back at her. “My 
father has just told me so. I am to go. And even if 
he had not told me, do you suppose I would ever consent 
to take second place to You, before my own servant, in 
a house where my word has been law for over twenty 
years? Do you imagine I would receive orders from You, 
or have to keep silence as if I was a child? The house 
has been my house until now. What would my friends 
think of me if I showed so little pride as to remain in it?” 

“Stop!” cried Mrs. Holmroyd, who had mutely drunk 
this cup of degradation to its dregs. “I pray you to 
say no more, Miss Burford, for you have said enough. 
Oh, more than enough of what is cruel and unjust. I 
have listened to you because my sympathies tell me that 
your voice has a true claim to be heard. You are right. 
This is your house, not mine, and I forgive you for the 
hard feelings with which you resist my coming into it. 
But it is not yet too late. No step has been taken that 
cannot be retraced. I will neither rob you of your 
father’s affection nor of your home.” 

She spoke with the quiet determination that convinced 
Miss Burford of her adversary’s sincerity, and brought 
her all at once out of the region of insensate anger into 


366 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the cold air of common-sense. To satisfy the vengeful 
feelings of her injured heart it was requisite to regard 
Mrs. Holmroyd as a wilful foe, a base, designing woman 
who had plotted dominion from the first day that she had 
schemed admittance into the Burford house. Such dis¬ 
positions as Miss Burford’s do not form their judgments 
on conscientious reasoning. They attribute to an ad¬ 
versary just such motives as justify them in their hatred, 
and will not admit the least element of goodness that 
makes their own position untenable. When Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd, therefore, pointed so clearly at the resolution to 
withdraw from her compact with the Councillor, Miss Bur- 
ford felt no prick of conscience. Nevertheless she stood 
sufficiently in awe of her father and of what his indignation 
might visit upon her for this unwarrantable interference 
with his plans, to be shocked at the course of action 
which her words had stung Mrs. Holmroyd to propose. 
For, in the momentous interview with her parent which 
had preceded this visit, the Councillor had let his will be 
known in no uncertain voice. He had stood with his 
broad back to the fire-place, and his hands locked behind 
his coat tails, and had told his daughter what he ex¬ 
pected, and had the right to expect, of her. He expected 
her (he said) to treat his second wife with consideration 
and respect . . . 

“Respect!” she had cried, as if the word—in such an 
application—burnt her tongue. 

“Aye. Respect!” the Councillor affirmed, with greater 
intensity than before. 

“Who else gives it her?” asked his daughter. “A 
woman living in a small house in a back street, with 
scarcely a penny to bless herself with. A stranger that 
nobody knows anything about—that nobody would ever 
have known of but for you. Me give respect to her!” 
She bit her lip with the mortification of so preposterous 


THE CHOICE 


367 


an idea. If her father insisted on bringing this creature 
into the house—against every dictate of decency, and 
in defiance of the disgust of all right thinking people— 
she would (she said) go out of it. He had been prepared 
for this threat, and envisaged it with the tranquillity 
that is as gall and wormwood to the threatener. 

“You’re old enough to please yourself,” he said. 

“Do you call that pleasing myself?” she cried. 

“You won’t say you’re doing it to please me” he 
answered dryly. But he did not ask her where she meant 
to go, or what she intended to do, or how she planned 
to earn her living. She was driven to reveal all this un¬ 
prompted. Or rather, she threw down the suggestion 
like a gauntlet, as a challenge to his opinion. She would 
take a situation; she would go out into service. 

“Well,” said her father, “I can’t stop you. If you 
won’t respect my wishes in one thing, you won’t in an¬ 
other. If you like going out into service better than 
stopping at home and behaving yourself, there’s no more 
to be said.” 

“And have the world cry shame of you!” his daughter 
blazed at him, rendered furious with his imperturbability, 
and seeking words and phrases to shake his temper and 
bring it down to a level with her own. 

“Shame of me!” he said. “How do you make that out? 
Because my daughter sets herself against my wishes, and 
thinks to make her father go her way when she refuses 
to go his! Shame of you , you mean.” 

“Now, see here!” he said. “. . . I’ve borne with 
you too long, Annie. I’m not your son; I’m your father. 
All that you have and enjoy comes from me. If you’d 
treated me more reasonable and considerate, who’s to 
say I should ever have thought of getting married again. 
But I’m tired of living in a house that isn’t my own, and 
being tret as if I’d no right to it. Folks that know any- 


368 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


thing will know very well I’m only taking a wife because 
I couldn’t get what comfort I’m entitled to from my 
own daughter.” 

So the discussion had gone on. In his own way the 
Councillor had been just and uncompromising. It wasn’t 
him, he said, that turned his daughter adrift. It was 
her that disputed his right to act according to his years 
and discretion. He gave her fair warning that he was 
going to be married. If she was prepared to be civil 
and reasonable and act her part as a daughter, and no 
more, she would be at liberty to remain in the house. 
That is . . . He hadn’t put the matter to his future 
wife yet, but he had no doubt she’d . . . 

“And do you think . . his daughter fired up; “that 
I would condescend to stay here with her permission? 
Has it come to this: that I’ve got to beg and pray of 
herf My word! No thank you.” 

“There’s no question of you begging and praying,” 
the Councillor argued. “And nobody knows that better 
than yourself. But I’m not going to allow a wife of 
mine to come into this house to be insulted, or made 
miserable by Anybody. And it amounts to this, Annie. 
If you’re resolved to take what’s happened in the w T rong 
spirit, and persevere in your intention to make trouble 
in my house . . . then we must try and provide for you 
in some other way. You’ll have to go and live with your 
brother.” 

“With Him . . . and Her!” cried Miss Burford 
furiously. “And submit to her untidy ways!” She 
pinched her lips to their firmest edge of determination. 
“Never. Never.” 

“Then you’ll have to go and live with your Aunt 
Matilda,” said her father dispassionately. 

“What! After the things she said to me about my 


THE CHOICE 369 

housekeeping ... in this very room?” his daughter 
expostulated. 

“Then where will you go?” asked the Councillor. 
“And who will you live with?” 

“I’ll go where I’m beholden to nobody,” she said 
hoarsely, on the verge of tears, “and live with them that 
value what I do for them.” 

“Ah!” said her father significantly. 

“I’ll earn my own bread. Yes. And let folks cry 
shame on you and her. I’ll go out charing. I’ll do 
like Elizabeth, and take no money but what I’ve earned.” 

She did not mean it, she knew. Even through the 
heat of her passion, she was aware she did not mean it. 
She threw worthless resolutions and empty words upon 
her fury to make it blaze spectacular, and terrify her 
parent with the awful conflagration actuated by his con¬ 
duct. And he knew she did not mean it. It was but her 
womanly unreasoning passion that spoke, and he had 
wisdom enough to treat such rhetoric with brevity. 

“I can’t do no more, Annie,” he said, pulling out his 
watch—an action that invariably stung and wounded 
her; inferring (as it plainly did) that he owed greater 
obligations to impersonal Time, than to his own daughter. 

“That’s it!” she said, taking scorn of the action. 
“Look at your watch. Say you must be going. Tell 
me you’re too busy to stop here arguing with me —just 
because you’ve nothing more to say. Leave me. Go 
back to Her. I’m Nobody.” 

After that they had reverted no more to the subject. 
She had had the prudence to retain no such visible re¬ 
membrance of the feud between them as would have im¬ 
posed silence on both sides, and the Councillor was 
doggedly determined to ignore, in this respect, his daugh¬ 
ter’s prejudices and resentments. He spoke of the 


370 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


weather, of the town, of the council-chamber, of his 
business, with a detachment which—in a quarrel stand¬ 
ing* on some more trivial base—would have incensed her 
to the most acrid retaliation, but which she made wise 
use of now to gain an indirect admission to her father’s 
mood. He, on his side, did not fail to note—beneath 
the chill reserve of his daughter’s demeanour—an alert¬ 
ness eager for every sign that fell from him; the evidence 
of an anger that strove to preserve its self-respect and 
yet to forfeit nothing by imprudence. Encouraged by 
these evidences he began to use the name of Mrs. Holm- 
royd with deliberation and intent, and Miss Burford re¬ 
strained herself from anything more discouraging than a 
tightening of the lips. But one evening, before return¬ 
ing to his business, he said without embarrassment: 
“By the way, Annie. It’ll have to be settled one way 
or another about this matter of me getting married. I 
don’t want to do nothing for the sake of annoyance. 
But I’ve got my future wife’s feelings to consider, and 
it’s about time she should know what’s going to happen 
here. I should like to be able to ask her up to tea one 
of these nights, but you may be sure I shan’t do that 
if it’s to involve her in any unpleasantness . . .” He 
paused, and Miss Burford merely hardened her mouth 
with an expression of determination pledged to nothing 
in particular, but prepared to wait frigidly upon events. 

“. . . She’s not the sort of lady to force herself any¬ 
where where she knows her presence isn’t welcome. But 
if you care to call round and see her . . . soon . . .” 

“See her?” his daughter echoed. “Me? What for?” 

“Why . . . To do the civil thing towards her,” the 
Councillor took up without irritation or diffidence. “And 
show her the politeness she has a right to expect from 
my daughter. There’s nobody understands politeness 
better, nor would appreciate it more.” 


THE CHOICE 


371 


Not daring to take up arms against a composure which 
she deemed (rightly) to be crucial, Miss Burford sought 
refuge in a non-committal “Indeed!” and touched articles 
on the table with hands expressive of a resolution un¬ 
altered and unalterable, though without verbal aggrava¬ 
tion of her father’s mood. 

“It comes to this, Annie,” he told her, buttoning his 
coat with a quiet but conclusive gesture, “both me and 
you’s got to settle which way we intend to take. You 
know which way Vm taking. I’m hoping my way will 
be your way. But if it’s not to be that, and you decide 
to go some other way . . . well, it’s forced to affect 
my plans. That’s all. I may push things on a little. 
I don’t want to do nothing rash or hasty, but it’s only 
fair to put the matter before you very straight. I don’t 
want to have no reproaches when it’s done, and be told 
you hadn’t fully understood, and why hadn’t I made my¬ 
self clearer? 

“. . . Eh?” He was going out as he spoke, and 
stopped at the door, dissatisfied with her inconclusive 
silence. “Do you hear, Annie?” He asked the final 
question with a certain sharpening of the tone calculated 
to impose discretion on the listener. 

“Yes. I hear,” Miss Burford answered in a voice 
purged of any quality more pronounced than aggrieve- 
ment. 

“That’s all, then,” her father acknowledged, with a 
resumption of his unruffled calm. “I only wanted to be 
sure. Time’s getting on for all of us.” 

4 

It had been an ultimatum on her father’s part. He 
had refused to quarrel with her. He had got past the 
stage where altercations with an injured daughter formed 


372 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


part of his habitual routine. He had got past the stage 
where it was necessary to suffer her periodic outbursts 
of annoyance and displeasure, and gratify her with the 
loss of his temper, by which sacrifice alone her equanimity 
might be restored, and the house resume its normal 
groove. So long as his daughter had been necessary 
to him, and he had been constrained to count on her for 
such comforts as lay in her power to give or to withhold, 
he had been under the obligation to quarrel with her. 
But now, she knew, his own cause was so sound and 
strong, he felt no necessity to lose his temper. He 
would be gravely, studiously, resolutely considerate to¬ 
wards her until the end. He had taken every step to 
salve his conscience. He had invited her to go his way; 
he had urged her to be respectful to the interloper; he 
had warned her of the consequences of her obstinacy. 
She had lit a bonfire of pretentious passion; burned up 
no end of indignant phrases and resounding resolutions. 
The spectacle had left him unimpressed. She watched 
him go down the garden path, and said to herself, with a 
resumption of the indignant blaze in which her perverse 
nature loved to live: 

“Never! Never! I will starve first.” 

And that very afternoon she had garbed herself with 
her customary punctilious and unresulting care, and had 
set off to visit Mrs. Holmroyd. In what mood she un¬ 
dertook the journey heaven knew alone. It changed with 
her as she walked. At one moment she was a crushed 
and broken woman, walking forth to make the supreme 
sacrifice of her wasted years. At another she was an 
indomitable spirit, too proud to own defeat, too resolute 
to beg, who went in obedience to a father’s arbitrary 
wish. But the red worm of revenge gnawed her very 
vitals, and the placatory phrases grew venomous as she 
shaped them. Indignations needed a vent. Alternately 


THE CHOICE 


373 


she attacked a foe, unmasked a traitor, or propitiated 
a rival. She was half a dozen women in as many minutes, 
and in such a changing atmosphere of passion policy 
was impossible. Yet in a dim way policy, of a sort, 
had shone through her conflicting moods like a lantern, 
through gusts of sleet and drift. She realized that this 
insensate opposition to her father’s will was fast placing 
her in a false and inextricable position. She strove, 
it is true, to oppose him to the last pitch of defiance, 
and to cost him and herself and all her world the max¬ 
imum of trouble and vexation in return for the sacrifice 
demanded of her. But she still wished to keep some 
pathway of retirement behind her, however narrow, by 
means of which she might—albeit still fighting—with 
dignity retreat. Part of her anger, it vexed her to 
perceive, lay against her own self. Her father had the 
right to marry; her father had the right to study his 
own convenience before hers. It was ridiculous to sup¬ 
pose that any man of her father’s age should submit to 
have his conduct ordered and dictated by a daughter. 
Why then had she contested the inevitable? Why had 
she taken up arms in a cause so obviously destined to 
defeat? Partly by reason of the solitude and retirement 
of her life, because this foolish gratification of her ill 
passion was become with her an indulgence—like cards, 
or tea-parties, or scandal. She treated herself to the 
luxury of indignation as a solatium for the emptiness 
of her days. She saw moreover that—like every other 
form of self-indulgence—the habit had grown upon her. 
For she retained no longer the old control upon herself; 
her sense of fitness and proportion was impaired; she 
lacked the power to direct her quarrels with a sure hand; 
she became their servant rather than their mistress. 
Already this controversy about Mrs. Holmroyd had 
taken her deeper than she had desired. Before her father 


374 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


she felt it almost impossible to assume the air and speech 
of ultimate surrender. Such a course seemed—after 
what herself had done and uttered—too limp, too 
cowardly, too craven. But it came to her—after her 
father’s departure—that it would be a fine revenge on 
him to go and manifest a noble spirit of forbearance 
to her rival. Yes. She would go and demonstrate such 
a disposition of magnanimity as should reproach and 
shame them both. “My father” (she would say to Mrs. 
Holmroyd) “has requested me to come and welcome you 
into the family with my own lips. I won’t deny that 
his action came as a blow to me ... at first. I won’t 
deny that I have thought, and doubtless said, some harsh 
things about you both. But he is my father. And if 
he sees his happiness in you . . . it’s not for me to 
thwart him. I wish him . . . and you, every happiness.” 

That, or some vague equivalent, had been in her mind 
all the while she walked. But no resolution that she 
could muster was equal to the task of renouncing the con¬ 
genial role of injury. In some presentation injury 
must show. And only by magnifying or creating wrongs 
was it possible to enjoy this orgy of martyrdom. So, 
as she made her way to Spring Bank Gardens, she attrib¬ 
uted endless calumnies to the guilty couple. “He will 
have told her . . .” “She will have said . . .” “Oh! 
I know what’s passed between them. I know what things 
they’ve uttered about me .” And these blind animosities, 
nurtured for her own gratification and enjoyment, had 
swept her off her feet. She plunged from recklessness 
to recklessness: whilst striving to portray patience under 
long suffering she tried her hardest to inflict wounds. 
There should be no peace for any of them. Their por¬ 
tion, henceforth, should be rancour, hatred and remorse. 

And then, Mrs. Holmroyd’s pale face and firm, deter- 


THE CHOICE 


375 


mined lips brought her back to consciousness of the in¬ 
sanity of the course her passion took. 

“It is not too late,” she heard Oswald’s mother tell 
her. “I will neither rob you of your father’s affection 
nor of your home. I too have had a home. Indeed, 
I have one still. This little house, with all its sad and 
precious memories, is very dear to me, Miss Burford.” 

In Miss Burford’s angry bosom the tender sentiment 
aroused only animosity. Such expressions used towards 
a house affronted her practical common-sense; she felt 
them as a demonstration of her adversary’s superiority. 
They were false, affected, ridiculous. Feelings so fine as 
this were wilfully assumed, like clothes and high looks 
and educated tones of voice, to try and impose on 
practical-minded people. But Mrs. Holmroyd had risen to 
her feet, and Miss Burford rose too, conscious of the 
utter disaster of her plans, yet powerless to flex the 
perversity of her stubborn nature and make it pliable 
to any policy save that to which the narrow moment 
bound her. 

“Not too late?” she said, suffering herself once more 
to taste before her rival the bitterness of injury. “Not 
too late? When you have turned my father against me? 
When you have twisted him round your little finger, 
Mrs. Holmroyd, and he has told me I am to go out and 
earn my own living, or starve, to make way for a perfect 
stranger, like you?” 

How much more she said Miss Burford scarcely knew 
or heeded, in the abandonment of her passion; nor did 
Mrs. Holmroyd glean too clearly what was said to her 
through the disturbance in her own emotions. In a sort 
of haze of unreality, a fume of shame and indignation 
and constraint the women took their leave of one another. 
Mrs. Holmroyd found herself alone at last in her polluted 


376 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


parlour, with her two hands tightly interlocked, and the 
tears of outrage slowly creeping through her lashes. 
Miss Burford, sustained by an inward rage, found her¬ 
self ultimately in the street, trembling with the efforts 
of her recent demonstration; shocked at the unpremed¬ 
itated violence of her visit, so utterly at variance with 
her intentions. If she could but have bent her stubborn 
pride she would have gone back to the house so violently 
left and craved forgiveness of her outraged rival. The 
thought—the longing; nay, the necessity—almost moved 
her. She turned once upon her heel; the very words 
importuned her lips: 

“Mrs. Holmroyd. Excuse me. I can’t take my leave 
of you like this. I know I am hot-headed, impulsive, 
abrupt, ill-tempered. I know I am. There is much of 
my father in me. All my friends say so. They all know 
and dread my tongue. I say things at times that I 
never intend. I haven’t meant half of what I’ve just 
said. I can’t think what ever made me say them. But 
you don’t realize how much I’ve gone through lately; 
how much I’ve had to put up with. What with my fa¬ 
ther . . . and house worries, and the servant . . .” 

And she would have modulated into the key of self¬ 
compassion, and solicited Mrs. Holmroyd’s indulgence 
for an overworked, hard-used, much-to-be-pitied crea¬ 
ture, to whom life and fate had been most cruelly un¬ 
kind. But the impulse—so strong one moment as to be 
well-nigh peremptory—died away like an electric wind. 

“To her!” she said, through her nipped, hard lips. 
“Go back and pray to her! So that she can tell my 
father all I’ve said and done!” 

And because this picture of their triumph was too 
vivid for her pride, and because, endowing them with 
looks and words and accents sharpened by herself, she 
warred not against them but against her own nature, and 


THE CHOICE 


377 


fell pierced by her own arrows—because of this she 
turned, siding definitely with the cause lost by her per¬ 
versity and folly, saying she was glad, now, that she had 
spoken her mind, and that Mrs. Holmroyd had been 
forced to swallow the bitter draught of truth, and that her 
father would be driven to do his worst; crying passion¬ 
ately within herself as she walked home: 

“Let him! What does it matter to me? I’m nobody. 
I’ll go and starve, and everybody will cry shame on him.” 


5 

To Mrs. Holmroyd this scene had proved terrible. 
Guiltless of the least intention of offence herself, she 
felt Miss Burford’s shame as if it had been her own, and 
shrank from contact with the dreadful human passion 
which had seared and branded her innocence, and left it 
scarred (or so it seemed to her) with infamy. In some 
sort, conscience reproved her, this was her punishment 
for the worship of false idols. None could desert true 
gods, betray noble ideals, without some bitter toll being 
taken. She, who had looked upon Miss Burford hitherto 
from the superior height of detachment, had laid herself 
open to the latter’s proper scorn; she had been treated 
with obloquy by one to whose lower level she had de¬ 
scended only after a protracted struggle with her prej¬ 
udices and pride. Nay, she had only come to accept 
the Councillor at all by a resolute detachment of him 
from his circle; by fixing her eyes upon himself, and blot¬ 
ting out the narrow life he lived and stood for. But 
now, with both arms Miss Burford had seemed to fling 
back double-doors upon the future, and cry: “See!” 
The prospect horrified, degraded her. She saw herself 
immersed for ever in a vulgar element of strife, buffeted 


378 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


between taunts and calumnies, charged with having 
wormed her way, for self-advancement, into a social 
world whose conditions repelled her. She foresaw noth¬ 
ing but wretchedness; nothing but remorse; nothing but 
disillusionment, and said: “What am I thinking of? It 
was a mistake. It can never be.” 

In this spirit of awakening to the truth she resolved 
to write to Councillor Burford. Yes, write before life’s 
necessities could cause her better self once more to waver. 
She resolved to write and tell him that, after much seri¬ 
ous thought and anxious deliberation, she found herself 
unable—for his sake no less than hers—to fulfil the 
promise given. She was engaged indeed upon this letter 
so difficult of execution when the Councillor called. 
Despite her stern resolve, his presence seemed to bring 
with it a sort of comfort. He greeted her with an in¬ 
timacy shorn of none of his old respect; continuing to 
address her, despite the change in their relations, as 
“Ma’am.” After the asp-like venom of his daughter’s 
tongue his broad and solid accents were reassuring. And 
then, try howsoever she would to muffle the degrading 
sentiment, his presence, and the friendship it bespoke, 
brought security into her precarious home. He stood 
firm rooted like a great tree, offering shelter to lonely 
widowhood. Within the ample radius of his branches 
no want could come; no penury, no care, no terror of 
the future. This, after all, had been the haven for her 
doubts to rest in; this big, broad man, with the solid 
worldly comfort he represented, had been during these 
latter days the true sustaining power of her mind. 

Perceiving her seated at the table, pen in hand, he 
feigned polite retirement, albeit still standing at the 
door. 

“Don’t let me disturb you, ma’am. I see you’re busy 
writing . . .” 


THE CHOICE 


379 


Thus challenged so directly, the spirit of her resolution 
faltered, but she made no effort to avoid the issue. 

“I was . . . writing to you,” she said. 

“To me?” He came forward at once and took his 
stand beside her. “Indeed. Then it’s well I thought to 
call. It’ll save somebody else a journey.—Shall I read 
what you’ve wrote?” He stretched out a hand towards 
the letter, and with sudden shame of the words she had 
struggled so hard to set on paper, she warded it from 
his possession. 

“No . . . please! On second thoughts ... I think I 
would rather you should wait until the letter is com¬ 
pleted.” She added, timorously: “It has been a difficult 
letter to write.” 

“Indeed, ma’am.” He noted then the signs of trouble 
on her face and said after a moment: “I’m sorry to 
hear that. Letters that’s difficult to write isn’t always 
very pleasant to read. May I ask what’s in it?” 

She turned slightly away from him, and braced herself 
to say: 

“I was writing to ask you to relieve me from my 
promise.” 

“What! Do you mean . . . ?” 

“Yes.” 

She was aware that he looked curiously at her from 
under his brows, with one hand plunged into the breast 
of his coat, and the gaze caused her heart to beat. Why? 
Because, in part she was afraid of a tussle with unequal 
forces; in part because she trembled with the sharpened 
consciousness of how much, for her son, had been staked 
upon this reckless throw. Suppose . . . Yes, suppose he 
told her: “Very well, ma’am.” Suppose he answered: 
“You know your own feelings best, ma’am. It doesn’t’ 
beseem me to try and force you against your will.” 
What then? What then, . . . when he had left her, and 


380 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


she sat alone amid the wreckage of a home beyond her 
power to maintain? 

“May I venture to ask,” the Councillor enquired, 
“what’s prompted you to write in that strain, ma’am?” 

She said: “I’ve been thinking. Thinking very seri¬ 
ously, Mr. Burford.” 

“Ah!” said he. 

“And the more I think . . . the more clearly I see the 
difficulties.” 

“Difficulties! What difficulties? Who for?” 

“For everybody concerned.” 

“Everybody concerned, ma’am? There’s only two that 
is concerned. That’s me and you. If it suits us , there’s 
no occasion why we should trouble our heads with nobody 
else.” 

She hazarded: . . Your daughter,” and he uttered 

a sententious “Ah! I thought I hadn’t been mistook. 
She’s been to see you.” 

Mrs. Holmroyd said hastily: “Please do not blame 
her. I had been thinking this matter over . . . long 
before then. I had felt that it was unfair, cruel, wrong 
of me to displace Miss Burford from the position in your 
house which she has enjoyed for so many years.” 

“What, ma’am!” interposed the Councillor. “Do you 
mean to say you’d go and compromise me before the 
whole Borough for no better reason than that? You’ve 
as good as given me your word, and I’ve seen no reason 
to keep the matter secret. What do you suppose my 
friends will say? What do you suppose the town of 
Daneborough will say if I’ve got to go and tell folks now 
that you’ve seen fit to change your mind? It’ll be a 
serious reflection on both of us, ma’am, and I venture to 
think you must see it. It’ll make me a laughing stock 
in the Council, and very likely do me harm in the Ward. 
It’s not as if you’d engaged to marry an ordinary 


THE CHOICE 


381 


Burgess; you’ve engaged to be the wife of a Town 
Councillor. I’m a public man in the public eye, and one 
can’t play fast and loose with one’s obligations towards 
the public without a loss of repitation and character. 
You must realize that for yourself, ma’am. I want to 
have no shade cast on your repitation, and I want none 
cast on mine. We’ve got to live in Daneborough, both 
of us, and I should be very sorry to lose one ounce of the 
respect I’ve earned in business and on the Council. 

. . . But of course, ma’am, if you tell me your opinions 
has undergone a change, and you don’t hold me in the 
same estimation you did . . 

“Oh, no, no, no!” Mrs. Holmroyd’s better nature cried, 
touched by the look he cast on her. 

“I’m very glad to hear you say that, ma’am,” the 
Councillor confessed, with obvious relief. “It’s very re¬ 
assuring.” And he turned to the subject of Miss Bur- 
ford without delay. Whatever Mrs. Holmroyd decided 
in this matter, he wished her clearly to understand that 
it would make no difference to the unfortunate relations 
existing between himself and his daughter. “Things has 
got to such a pitch at home now that something’s forced 
to be done. We can’t go on any longer as we are. So 
if you’re actuated by any mistaken notion of helping 
Annie, ma’am, against me . . . you can dismiss it from 
your mind at once. You’re not to blame in any way for 
what’s happened. She’s brought it on herself. She ought 
to have been married years ago, and if she’d been the 
right sort of woman to manage a husband I’m not the 
father to have wished to stand in her way. She could 
have had a home of her own and welcome. And I know 
this, ma’am. If Annie’d once got the idea of marriage 
into her head no consideration of me would have kept her 
where she is. And is a man of my age to be ruled by 
his own daughter, and have his actions settled just in 


382 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


such a way as suits her temper and convenience? Are 
we to be governed by our children, ma’am?” Mrs. 
Holmroyd thought of Oswald and of all the sacrifices 
she was prepared to make for him, and said in a faint 
voice of half concurrence: “Not in all things, Mr. 
Burford.” 

“Annie’s been almost past living with, these last ten 
years,” her father said. “And any man of less patience 
than me would have married long ago, if only to be rid 
of her. I’ve never took that view myself. I can hon¬ 
estly say, ma’am, I never gave marriage a thought for its 
own sake until I met you. When a man that’s been mar¬ 
ried once gets to my age and sees the matrimonial troubles 
of his friends, and them that aren’t his friends, he thinks 
twice before he risks making the mistake again. It’s 
come to this: the same house won’t hold me and my 
daughter. I’m sorry to say it, and it’s no fault of mine 
that it should be so, but it is so. And if even you was 
to say you wouldn’t take the place you said you would 
at the head of my house, me and Annie would part com¬ 
pany all the same. If I’m not to have a wife sitting at 
my table, I won’t have a daughter there that’s done noth¬ 
ing and does nothing but cross my will. I won’t have her 
sitting opposite me and saying to herself: ‘7 stopped 

his game.’ For that’s what she would say, ma’am. And 
I shouldn’t think of asking you to share my house as long 
as there was her in it to make you miserable. For that’s 
what she would do. She’s no friend of yours. I’ll own 
it. She’s no friend of nobody’s. She’s never satisfied 
unless she has her own way, and never happy when she 
gets it. I shall provide for her wants, you may be sure, 
and treat her generous as befits a man’s own daughter. 
But it’s time I was spared the petty worries and vexations 
that seems the breath of life to her, and had a house of 


THE CHOICE 


383 


my own which I could take some pride and pleasure in.” 

He talked without any sign of heat, without the least 
visible desire to gain points in argument by vilifying the 
character of the absent one. His tone was that of a re¬ 
gretful and dispassionate regard for truth; mourning fact 
as it was, but seeking neither to magnify nor diminish it. 
And his reasoned arguments put him incontestably in the 
right. “It’ll be very hard on me, ma’am,” he said, “if 
you’re going to throw me and all my happiness overboard, 
just because of a daughter that cares for neither. I 
don’t deny you’re acting up to principle, and only trying 
to do what’s right—in fact, I’ve far too high an opinion 
of your character to think you’d ever stoop to any course 
of action that’s unworthy of you. But if you’re going 
to take Annie’s part and tell me in all seriousness I’ve 
got to sacrifice myself and you for her . . . Why!” he 
said, with a gesture of bewilderment, “I can’t understand 
it. But I hope, after what’s been said, you’ll see what a 
mistake you would be making if you was to press your 
objections any further. Of course as I’ve said before, if 
your objection is personal, and it’s me that’s the real 
stumbling-block . . . well, I suppose you’ve a right to 
consider yourself, ma’am. But I think, in that case, you 
should have spoke sooner, and spared me what—you can’t 
fail to realize—is forced to be a great humiliation for 
me. There’s nobody in Daneborough that doesn’t know 
Councillor Burford, but folks has got to ask who Mrs. 
Holmroyd is . . . and you’d be spared much that I should 
have to suffer. I won’t deny that I’ve had to put up 
with a little harmless chaff already, and there’s a lot of 
people who quiz me about the step I’ve taken—but it 
would be highly unpalatable if our arrangement was 
broken off at this stage, and I’ve the confidence to hope 
you’ll think better of your intention, ma’am.” 


384 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


6 

Councillor Burford’s arguments prevailed. They pre¬ 
vailed because, first of all, they were incontestable. And 
they prevailed because, in the second place, Mrs. Holm- 
royd was moved by this big man’s pride and faith in her. 
And they prevailed because, as he spoke, quietly rear¬ 
ranging the situation in a new perspective of duty, she 
clung unconsciously to a need that satisfied every call of 
conscience, and yet avoided the dire alternative from 
which, even in making her confession, she had shrunk. 
Here were two sides to the controversy, each with its ap¬ 
peal to conscience, and though the quarrel in itself was 
crude and dreadful, and roused in her a deep repugnance 
against being mixed so closely with sentiments and acts 
so foreign to her nature, she contrasted Councillor Bur- 
ford’s voice and quiet manner with the compressed ani¬ 
mosity of his daughter this afternoon. The wish to 
wound, the wish to hurt and injure, put her plainly out of 
the court of sympathy. Mrs. Holmroyd indulged an 
academic sorrow for the misguided creature—that owed 
itself to conscience, and not to feeling. She knew—she 
had known all along—that between herself and Miss 
Burford there existed not the least bond of interest or 
friendship. Their views of life were utterly at variance. 
All she could ever hope for, so far as she and Miss Bur- 
ford were concerned, would be an occasional lull in their 
hostilities, when Miss Burford wearied of attack and came 
to closer quarters for the detection of fresh sources of 
aggrievement. Miss Burford had formed ever the dark 
background of this matrimonial life to come; had formed 
ever the enigma of its possibility: sphynx-like and, up 
to now, insoluble. It is true that the Councillor had 


THE CHOICE 


385 


spoken of Mrs. Holmroyd’s place at the head of his house, 
and had, without any detailed explanation, considered 
his daughter as dispossessed of her domestic governance, 
saying: “Annie, of course, will make way for you, ma’am. 
You’ll be entire mistress of your own affairs.” But the 
precise nature of her disposal had never been revealed, 
and Mrs. Holmroyd—though this problem perplexed her 
with many painful considerations—had never dared or 
cared to press fon clearer definitions. That she could 
not possibly occupy a house in common with the Coun¬ 
cillor’s daughter seemed obvious. But she could not bring 
herself to take the steps which should precipitate Miss 
Burford’s displacement. She left the matter in the hands 
of providence, assuring herself whenever the uncertainty 
grew too acute: “Of course . . . She will understand. 
Her father will have prepared her.” Re-marriage in it¬ 
self was a procedure sufficiently repugnant to her con¬ 
science, but a re-marriage complicated by so many ugly 
features tended at times to make her sick at heart. She 
relapsed, however, on that selective and protective power 
of her sex which sees fervently only just so much of truth 
as it seeks and needs to see. By detaching Councillor 
Burford from all environment; by seeing him persistently 
in the glamour of intimacy and kindness thrown over 
him by her own small house; by associating him with many 
happy memories of her little parlour, where she and Os¬ 
wald and Beryl had sat and listened for his coming foot¬ 
step, and so weaving him by deft feminine processes into 
the very texture of that dear, departed life, already made 
holy by the hand of death ... by doing this, and see¬ 
ing him so, cut off from contact with the grosser world, 
but linked as it were by many subtle strands to the 
spiritual, she had cajoled her affections into a sentimental 
liking for the big, broad man that bore no great weight of 
reason, but cracked like thin ice beneath the heel of real- 


386 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ity. And now the spectre of Miss Burford was laid at 
last, by her father’s own hand. He had taken from Mrs. 
Holmroyd the least pretext for self-reproach. He had 
told her that whether she kept her faith with him or not, 
his daughter’s case would be unaltered in so far as it 
concerned her father and her father’s home. 

“You are not in any way to blame, ma’am,” he had 
told Mrs. Holmroyd. “Set your mind entirely at ease 
on that point. It was always understood that Annie 
should keep house for me as long as things went on as they 
was. But she knew very well that some day I might want 
a better helpmate. And when that day came she was 
aware she’d have to make way.” 

So conscience was salved, and the difficulty smoothed 
away. Mrs. Holmroyd, with exemplary discretion, con¬ 
fided little to the Councillor’s enquiry about his daugh¬ 
ter’s visit: “Well . . . She’s been to see you then. 
How did she behave herself? I hope she remembered 
what was due to you, and treated you with proper re¬ 
spect.” 

When the Councillor took leave at length, the compact 
was sealed beyond all cancellation. If she would show 
herself to be an honourable woman, innocent of the charge 
of inconstancy, and loyal to a pledge twice given, there 
could be no retraction now. Feelings, fears, doubts, 
misgivings—Yes ! and dislikes and repugnances—must be 
hid henceforth within a casket of secrecy, and sealed with 
silence. The larger liberties were lost to her; at one 
fell swoop she had bartered the freedom of existence and 
was become a vassal to her own promise. And because 
she held the promise of a woman holy, and faith between 
all human creatures inviolable, she felt the more in terror 
of her state of servitude. For we are slaves, less to one 
another, than to such rules of conduct as we hold un¬ 
breakable, for the preservation of our own souls. 


THE CHOICE 


387 


7 

Mrs. Holmroyd’s friendship with the Rencils, grown 
much closer since the death of Beryl and their wondrous 
sympathy and kindness in this dark hour of her need, had 
brought exceeding comfort to her. This contact, on a 
footing of something close to intimacy, had served to 
sharpen her aspirations and to give her the illusion of 
living near to those higher things which her life had 
lost. The briefest space of time passed in the charmed 
happiness of the Organist’s home repaid her for many 
anxieties and days of doubt. It was only there, with her 
spirit lips attached to the cup of their perfect happiness, 
and draining every word and look and act for her soul’s 
sustenance, that her full self expanded and she regained 
the full vision of life’s loveliness. At such moments her 
husband came back to her. He was no longer lying in his 
grave at Clothton, but here in the midst of them, reani¬ 
mated by their human sympathy and living in their smiles 
and glances. Her struggles were known to the Organ¬ 
ist and his wife; they were drawn to her gentleness. Each 
took pleasure in the other, and Mr. Rencil and his wife 
experienced, after every visit that Mrs. Holmroyd paid 
them, that glow of human satisfaction in the knowledge of 
happiness conferred. 

But the consciousness of her new relationship towards 
Councillor Burford weighed on Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart 
like lead. An intuition, that stabbed content with the 
sharpness of a knife, told her that this new intrusive ele¬ 
ment would mar assuredly the perfect sympathy of their 
friendship. She felt its darkening influence in herself; 
she feared, once the secret was divulged, that she would 
note a corresponding change in them. Twice she called 
to see Mrs. Rencil for the express purpose of confession, 


388 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


and twice her courage failed her. “I ought to have 
spoken,” she reproached herself in walking home. “After 
their great kindness to me . . . this silence on mj part 
becomes deceptive.” But the thought of the confession, 
and the consciousness of her almost insurmountable re¬ 
luctance to make it, showed her the true nature of the 
obligation entered into. After her decisive interview with 
Councillor Burford, however, she resolved that nothing 
should deter her from making an announcement already 
overdue. And she called forthwith at the house in Hill 
Street with this single purpose in her mind. For all her 
resolution it came as a positive relief to learn that Mrs. 
Rencil was not in, but the Organist himself ran down to 
greet the visitor, and pressed her to go upstairs—saying 
that his wife might return home at any moment. In¬ 
deed, Mrs. Holmroyd had not been seated long in the 
sunlit upper room before Ethel Rencil arrived, invoking 
“Arthur!” as she mounted the stairs, in a voice half song¬ 
ful. Ah! That touched the visitor’s heart like an old 
tune; sharpened her eyes with the brightness of half-shed 
tears in a moment. Such a tender revelation of com¬ 
panionship, of mutual dependence for happiness, the one 
upon the other, stung her to a sort of ecstasy that owned 
not anything of covetousness, but only of appreciation 
and of yearning. And a sudden flood of misery submerged 
her as she thought of herself and contrasted her lot 
with theirs. Not so would she have the joy of calling 
on her second husband’s name. Nay, she had not yet 
familiarized herself with his embodiment sufficiently to 
think of him in terms of Christian names at all. For 
her he was still Councillor Burford; still the blunt, self- 
constituted caller whom she treated, even in the secret 
places of her heart, with the most scrupulous distance 
and respect. The perfect intimacy of united lives, the 
lovely cup of fellowship to which each contributes and 


THE CHOICE 


389 


from which each sips in turn—the perfect union of af¬ 
finities was not for her. Only a sense of duty, a spirit 
of loyalty and true service superseding love, could sanc¬ 
tify a marriage such as this she had the hardihood to con¬ 
template. It held no raptures, such a state. There was 
no joy to be expected of it. Only justification. 

In the midst of these reflections, swift and poignant, 
Mrs. Rencil entered. Her smile—just wide enough at 
first to frame the looked-for figure of her husband—ex¬ 
panded instantly to recognition of the visitor, crying what 
a welcome surprise this was, and how kind of her to come 
and see them. Yet to Mrs. Holmroyd—preoccupied with 
inward comparisons, and troubled with problems respect¬ 
ing the disclosure which conscience was resolved to make, 
and hypersensitive to all external influences and sug¬ 
gestions—the manner of the Organist’s wife, albeit super¬ 
ficially cordial, betrayed something of the simulated 
brightness of formality which, like a meretricious picture, 
invokes the aid of a high varnish to compensate for its 
lack of depth. With a reciprocal smile upon her lips 
that accompanied a painful sinking of the heart, the 
visitor said to herself: 

“She knows. She has heard. Perhaps she is offended. 
I ought to have told her before.” 

And at the first moment offering her purpose its 
shirked and sought-for opportunity, she stumbled into 
confession, saying she should be sorry for them to learn 
the news from any lips except her own. The opening 
was, perhaps, infelicitous—since it imposed on her hearers 
the polite duty of dissimulation. Both Mr. and Mrs. 
Rencil, in fact, did their utmost by facial expression to 
give their guest the assurance her words appeared to 
call for, although she fancied that Mrs. Rencil’s more 
sophisticated eye belied the ignorance it strove so ear¬ 
nestly to feign. And her heart beat heavily within her. 


390 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


She felt the blood suffuse her face and neck as she made 
the hateful declaration, suffering an odious sensation of 
being bathed in her own guilt. For just one moment 
both the Organist and his wife retained their expressions 
of friendly interest with w 7 hich they had awaited her an¬ 
nouncement, and she had the feeling that during this brief 
space of time they sought w T ithin themselves—and of each 
other—for guidance as to the nature of their next look, 
and their next word. But, fractional though the hesita¬ 
tion was, to Mrs. Holmroyd it seemed abysmal. Some¬ 
thing died down; dropped like a dead leaf; floated silently 
out of this circle of sympathy. The tone of friendship 
sustained by all of them, till then, sank of its own weight 
to the level of politeness and conventional pretence. For 
they knew already what she had to tell them; of that 
Mrs. Holmroyd entertained no doubt. She heard Mrs. 
Rencil say: “Indeed! . . .” in a voice of unconvincing 
surprise. The Organist contented himself with turning 
the bland beam of his glasses in the direction of his wife, 
as though to reciprocate her interest. “How nice of 
you to come and tell us. . . . Of course, we won’t breathe 
a word—will we Arthur! At least . . . until we have 
your permission.” She strewed her empty phrases over 
the situation as if they had been wisps of coloured wool, 
picked hap-hazard from a work-basket, expressive of 
nothing but artificial brightness. 

“Is it anybody we know, Mrs. Holmroyd?” 

The words “we know” rose up in accentuation above 
the rest like a weal on smitten flesh. Mrs. Holmroyd said 
with obvious constraint: 

“I think . . . perhaps, by name. It is Mr. Burford.” 

Again there followed that slight, infinitesimal pause— 
that fine, sharp edge of silence which cuts so deep. 

“Do you mean . . . the Councillor?” Mrs. Rencil 
asked, and though politeness could not have designated 


THE CHOICE 


391 


Mrs. Holmroyd’s future husband by any nicer name, it 
was (as Mrs. Holmroyd’s burning cheeks attested) a 
euphemism for the business he pursued. She bowed her 
head slightly, “Yes,” divining with pain at heart that they 
were disappointed in her; that she had sunk below the 
standard of their expectations. In her trouble she seemed 
to hear their inward voices crying, each one to the 
other: 

“How could she! How could she!” 

And the outer voice of Mrs. Rencil, speaking for the 
first time, added: 

“You have our sincere wishes for your happiness, Mrs. 
Holmroyd.” 

Happiness! Oh, the mockery of it. For she was 
powerless to excuse or justify her action. She, who had 
spoken ever of her husband and the love she bore to him 
and he to her; who had built her friendship with the Ren- 
cils on the corner-stone of this . . . came now to tell 
them she was pledged to be the wife of a big, illiterate, 
prosperous Daneborough tradesman. That love had led 
her to such a step was, for them and all the world who 
judged her, quite unthinkable. If she sought to plead 
the warmth of her affections in excuse, she rebuked her 
sense of fitness and fine feeling. If she vindicated her 
heart she accused her head. She experienced a terrific 
longing to unbosom herself to these two friends—the only 
friends she had; to put her course of action before them 
in its true perspective. But that would have involved 
disloyalty to her future husband. To hint at any dero¬ 
gation of him was to condemn her own self and cause. 
And though her spiritual loneliness cried out for some 
companionship to which it might confide its sorrows, she 
knew that such a confidence would only tend to widen the 
breach of sympathy between them. She was conscious of 
that breach of sympathy in their scrupulous choice of 


392 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


questions. She sensed their difficulty. Her conduct in this 
second marriage shocked them. They despised her. She 
felt certain they despised her, although politeness de¬ 
manded that they should simulate a superficial interest 
in her still. They sought only such questions as skirted 
the centre of the topic, striving to preserve their own de¬ 
tachment from a theme so alien to their hearts; to com¬ 
promise themselves in no respect towards her new life, 
whilst endeavouring to preserve the outward semblance of 
unbroken friendship. Did she think of marrying soon? 
She would, no doubt, be leaving the house in Spring Bank 
Gardens? Perhaps she would be not altogether sorry to 
leave a district of such sad associations. But they asked 
her little. They skilfully ignored her obvious desire to 
be questioned, so that she might have the assurance of 
their fellowship at all points; so that, aided by interroga¬ 
tion, she might justify her conduct somewhat; might show 
a vestige of her heart to them. And in a tentative way 
she tried—with a desperation belied by the gentleness 
of her face and speech—to communicate, as though in 
answer to enquiry, the things they failed to ask of her, 
hoping (though she lacked the inward satisfaction of it) 
that they might perceive something of her true heart and 
mind beyond. And they said: “Of course . . and 

sought to show themselves as nice as could be to one who 
had sunk so far below the high consideration of their 
friendship. 

And with that—or little more—the subject of her 
second marriage was interred, and it seemed plain to her 
that the spirits of the Organist and his wife left its place 
of sepulture with alacrity. The little Alice came in, and 
the Organist made fun with her in his own delightful 
fashion; and his wife—watching the spectacle with un¬ 
concealed rapture—turned from time to time to Mrs. 
Holmroyd with resumption of her old self, as though to 


THE CHOICE 


393 


invite her guest into the circle of their happiness. But 
all the while Mrs. Holmroyd participated with a pain 
at heart, like one who tastes of the sweetness of confrater¬ 
nity for the last time: too sick to eat. Sad at heart she 
took her leave at length, and Mr. Rencil accompanied her 
downstairs. For some inexplicable reason she had half 
hoped he would. They descended the staircase and 
reached the hall, and the Organist opened the door, and 
she saw and sensed the world of awful emptiness beyond 
—dark and cold and comfortless as the grave itself, with¬ 
out one single flame of fellowship to light and warm it. 
And suddenly, with a surgent impulse that her soul could 
not withstand, she turned upon the Organist a face of 
supplication. 

“Mr. Rencil . . .” Her voice had dropped almost to 
a whisper, and she accompanied the exclamation with a 
faint gesture of the hand, weak and aimless, and yet 
charged with a curious expressive beauty of its own in 
the Organist’s sight. Such a transient gesture as weds 
itself to looks or words once in a lifetime, and makes 
them memorable by means of a vague loveliness for which 
no meaning can be found; of an emotion that goes straight 
to the heart, albeit the heart knows neither how nor why. 

“Mr. Rencil . . . You will not think too hardly of me. 
You will not blame me too greatly! . . .” 

He said: “Blame you, Mrs. Holmroyd!” in a voice 
of unmistakable surprise, for her gesture and her accents 
of intensity had found him unprepared. 

“For the step I am taking,” she explained. “Oh! Be¬ 
lieve ... I want you to believe, please ... I want you 
both to believe, if you will, that I have not acted in this 
matter lightly. It has cost me many days and weeks 
of anxious thinking.” 

She looked earnestly into his face, and he answered 
with gentle gravity: 


394 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“We appreciate your character too well, Mrs. Holm' 
royd, to suppose for a moment that you would take any 
step unless it fully satisfied your conscience.” 

She could see his face no longer for the tears that 
flooded him from sight. A tide of divine sorrow sub¬ 
merged, yet sustained her. For a moment she stood thus 
and tasted the insufferable sweetness of a rapture akin 
to death. 

“Life holds nothing more precious for me . . .” she 
went on in a voice broken by the stress of her emotion, 
“than the sympathy and friendship I have found in this 
house. They have sustained me, helped me, during many 
dark moments. I cannot tell you how much my heart 
owes to the kindness you have shown it. . . .” 

Her voice, breaking at that, she offered him—as though 
in attestation of a debt unpayable—her hand. He took 
it, and impulsively she laid her second hand for one mo¬ 
ment over his and pressed it with a sudden effusion of 
friendship and of gratitude. Then, without another word 
or look she took her leave and bore her full heart away 
from this house of insupportable sweetness. 

Arthur Rencil gazed out for a moment into the street, 
and closed the door with the slow preoccupation of one 
who acts still under the influence of a deep emotion, 
walking gravely up the staircase to the room where his 
wife awaited him. Her head was turned over her shoul¬ 
der to the open doorway in anticipation of his return, and 
her first question when he entered was: 

“What did she say to you downstairs, dear?” 

“S|ie begged that we would not blame her too greatly.” 

“How sad. She feels it, Arthur. When you wished 
her all happiness . . . her lip trembled. For very little 
she would have burst into tears. Didn’t you notice?” 

“I realized she was in trouble. I tried not to look at 
her too closely.” He moved to the mantel-piece. “Just 


THE CHOICE 


395 


as she was going away . . . she thanked us, Ethel, for 
our kindness to her. She said we could not realize how 
much her heart owed us. I think she has the fear that 
what she is doing may cost her our friendship.” 

Mrs. Rencil said: “Poor woman . . . poor woman. 
It is a terrible position to be in. I suppose she sees no 
alternative. She is thinking only of her little boy.— 
Such a pretty woman too. Don’t you think so, Arthur? 
At times, when she is smiling, she looks quite young. She 
speaks so prettily, too. I love to listen to her. Don’t 
you? She is my conception of a thoroughly good 
woman.” 

“Are there such things,” the Organist enquired thought¬ 
fully, “as thoroughly good women?” 

“You know there are!” his wife exclaimed, with a smile 
that did not altogether dissipate her gravity. “I can’t 
explain how it is . . . but somehow, I always feel a better 
woman when I am with her. But marrying a man like 
that!” She gave a little shudder. “Whatever can they 
have in common? Oh! it seems shocking for so much good¬ 
ness and refinement to be thrown away. She deserves a 
better husband.” And with glistening eyes she added: 
“Somebody more like you, Arthur.” 

The Organist turned a luminous smile upon her through 
his glasses. 

“But I am not a City Father with a flourishing busi¬ 
ness and a fat banking account, Ethel. I am only a 
poor church organist who has to make up in goodness 
what he lacks in money.” 

“If it only needs money to make you different from 
what you are,” his wife attested stoutly, “I hope we 
may always be poor. Oh, Arthur! When I think of 
Mrs. Holmroyd, I feel how truly thankful we ought both 
to be. We have been married nearly ten years—and dur¬ 
ing all that time we have never had anything more than 


396 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


just those silly quarrels that teach us how dear we are 
to one another.—What’s that?” It was the sound of 
tottering and unsteady scales from the music room. “A 
pupil? Were you expecting anybody?” 

Arthur Rencil looked up through his glasses and made 
a comic gesture of despair. 

“Of course I wasn’t. It’s true that I told her to come 
at half-past five, but she forgets everything else I tell 
her—and why she has remembered this I can’t imagine. 
Still . . . it’s part of the happiness we’ve both of us got 
to be so thankful for, Ethel! And when she has been 
thirteen times, and I have sent in the bill, and her father 
comes to settle it six months later—the money will go 
nicely towards paying for that last new hat of yours . . . 
or the next one!” He was leaving his wife with a smile 
when she called him by name. 

“Arthur!” 

“Yes.” 

“Don’t be long, dear!” 

“You mean ... I am to give my pupil short measure, 
Ethel? Why?” 

“No. Of course I didn’t mean that. But don’t give 
her longer than she’s supposed to have. Come back and 
bring your writing here, and sit with me. I promise not 
to talk. I’ll do my fancy work. But I like to have you 
near me.” 

He went back to her, responsive to the supplication in 
her eyes, took her head in his two hands and kissed her. 
She held his neck captive for awhile, nestling her cheek 
against his, and said: “Oh, Arthur . . . what must the 
world be like to those who have no love to turn to when 
they need it!” 


BOOK X 


THE CRUCIBLE 

1 

O F his mother’s anxious inner life during these 
latter weeks Oswald had known nothing. Chil¬ 
dren accept the outer semblance shown them by 
their elders as implicitly as they take food from their 
hands. When his mother sat in silence he might wonder 
—after a while—as to the cause of it, and marvel that she 
should be sad. For sorrow, bitter though it may be to 
childhood in the first moment, is shed like tears and as 
easily forgotten. Oswald remembered with a diligently 
nurtured sadness that his little sister was dead; that he 
had lost his father years before. But these things, as 
reasons for present grief, seemed vague and difficult to 
comprehend. When, after some deeper silence than usual, 
he looked up to see the slow tears creeping down his 
mother’s face, he experienced a feeling of embarrass¬ 
ment bordering on shame, and after gazing long enough 
to reassure himself that his first glance had not erred, 
he turned away his eyes as from some spectacle to which 
it was not meet he should be party. When his mother 
gazed into her purse and sighed, the act prompted him 
to recall that they were very poor, and he reflected a 
look appropriately mournful—not that he comprehended, 
save at second hand, what poorness signified; for always 
he had food to eat, and clothes to wear, and sometimes a 
whole penny in his pocket to spend. Between him and 
the outer world his mother intervened; its shrill blasts 
reached him only through the thickets of her love—stir- 


398 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ring her solicitude above him, like the raging wind sub¬ 
dued to soporific faintness in the topmost branches of tall 
forest trees. 

But he was aware, since little Beryl’s death, that a 
hush had fallen over life, as if each day were Sunday. 
Their voices had never quite regained their old bright¬ 
ness ; and if ever Oswald broke into song upon the stairs, 
he checked himself at once with a sense of guilt. He was 
aware, too, that something secret and impalpable, some¬ 
thing like a tissue of the finest gauze, wrapped him to his 
mother in a new relationship of love. He was aware that 
he had grown more precious to her since Beryl’s death, 
and though he did his utmost to dissimulate unworthy 
feelings, the boy in him could not ignore the proud con¬ 
sequences resulting from this increase in his value. Yes. 
He meant more to his mother; she leaned on him. She 
looked to him; he found her eyes upon him set in a gaze 
of worship and admiration . . . and he experienced the 
tremble of pride trying prodigiously to be humble; of an 
elation struggling to be duly sad. And though he was 
sensible of the restraint imposed upon his youth by the 
necessity to act this graver part, and though—from time 
to time—his impulses broke out and traitorously betrayed 
him; the weeks that passed since Beryl’s death enfolded 
his life in a sort of sanctified and golden glamour. The 
supernatural softness of his mother’s voice and eyes; the 
religious sublimity of his own behaviour which, as a de¬ 
tached spectator, he took occasion to admire from time 
to time, marvelling at the heights of righteousness his 
conduct reached—without effort or conscious striving, 
but by a kind of natural aptitude as if he had (indeed) 
a genius for being good. He would say “Yes, mother,” 
“No, mother” and “If you please, mother” in such tones 
as he knew she loved to hear; and walked upstairs with a 
tread so considerate of the hallowed home he lived in, 


THE CRUCIBLE 


399 


and of his mother’s feelings, as brought the blush of self¬ 
appraisement to his brow. He did—like most of us—the 
things that capture praise, and it was a joy to him to 
live in a world where goodness found such prompt appre¬ 
ciation and such ineffable reward. Nay, he even reached 
that pinnacle of exalted attainment where he was able to 
commiserate inferior humanity, and ask how men could 
ever stoop to sin at all, with such incentive to be virtuous. 

Although Oswald possessed the quick eye and instan¬ 
taneous observance of outward things that is the heritage 
of healthy youth, he had as yet acquired no skill at all in 
the art of translation from the open page of life and draw¬ 
ing inference from fact. Thus, the visits of the burly 
Councillor had (to him) meant nothing more than what, 
externally, they seemed to be. And when his mother dis¬ 
closed at length the full significance of what the Coun¬ 
cillor’s comings stood for, the intelligence seemed at first 
too vast to be packed into the small compass of his child¬ 
ish mind. Nor could he comprehend how it came to be 
that his mother wept over him in imparting the prodi¬ 
gious news, and clasped him to her heart, and implored 
him “never . . . never to forget his own dear father.” 
But already he had arrived at the stage of understanding 
which accepts as fact that feminine tears mean different 
things at different times, and that they are not always to 
be taken as implying pain and grief alone, but stand 
sometimes for joys and prides, and feelings too remote 
for words, and memories which no speech can adequately 
represent. He was too young, as yet, to scorn his 
mother’s tears; he held them rather in a mute respect as 
emblems of a wisdom higher than his own. His youth 
felt vaguely conscious of its inability to read or under¬ 
stand them. Nor was the announcement with which they 
were accompanied much more comprehensible to his mind. 
At first the tidings spread over his intelligence and 


400 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


clouded his present melancholy happiness in life like a 
great sad cloud. But little by little, gathering reassur¬ 
ance from his mother’s voice, and mollified by the extra 
love which she pressed on his acceptance, as if it had been 
a tempting slice of birthday cake, he began to recover 
confidence. Those changes that older people stand in 
dread of show friendly to the heart of youth. His quick 
■eye saw a hundred possibilities in this wonderful event 
disclosed to him, and his tongue—seeking after enlighten¬ 
ment—betrayed too clearly to his mother’s ears the eager¬ 
ness within him. What? Did it mean that they were 
going to leave their present home ? Did it mean that they 
were both of them to go and live at Rockery House, over¬ 
looking the Town Acres, upon the Hunmouth Road? 

It hurt her, as she had foreknown it would, to find how 
greedily her son’s words grasped after these new pos¬ 
sibilities in life, and she asked him with reproachful sad¬ 
ness in her tones: Would he be glad to leave this house 
• „ . that had been home to them for so long? The tone 
and the phrasing of her question were not lost upon him, 
and he dropped his head. No. He would not be glad. 
He would be sorry . . . for some things.—But were they 
really going to leave it, all the same? Were they, 
mother ? 

Yes. They were going to leave it. 

And were they going to live in Councillor Burford’s 
big house? 

She said “Yes . . .” and closed her eyes. 

Only one consideration shadowed his eager face with 
doubt. 

Would Miss Burford live there too? And when his 
mother reassured him: “No, dear,” he drew a deep 
breath. Little by little his keen imagination attached it¬ 
self to the project. Just as his mother did—unknown to 
him—though with infinitely more success, he tuned his 


THE CRUCIBLE 


401 


mind to the impending change. The first stupefaction 
gave place to zeal, to enthusiasm, to pride. When the 
big Councillor called one day, and—having first enquired 
of Mrs. Holmroyd: “Have you got him told yet, 
ma’am?” and being assured she had—took Oswald by the 
sleeve and asked him: “Well my lad! What do you 
think of me for your new father?” Oswald’s bosom swelled 
with a vast importance. He began to experience a pride 
in this great new acquisition to the family prestige. Yes. 
He began to be proud that this big, broad man with the 
grey beard and the authoritative voice, and substantial 
square-toed, well-blacked boots, was soon to be his second 
father. The thought of the shop in High Gate, with the 
two bowed windows and the big tea canisters and the 
abysmal bottles of boiled sweets, coated inside with their 
delectable sugary bloom, and the assistants in their white 
aprons and uprolled sleeves—filled him with fervour. 
His youthful ardours, playing about the thought of it, 
imbued the shop with unsuspected marvels. The magic 
of accessibility threw it into a terrific light. He began 
to conceive a passion for grocery and all pertaining to 
it. And then, the splendid house along the Hunmouth 
Road, approachable through a cast-iron gate with a cor¬ 
rugated handle; and the impressive Mansion House where 
Councillor Burford walked in and out with perfect free¬ 
dom, and showed his head above the moreen curtains in 
the Council Chamber. All these things were, in a sense, 
secured to him by a sudden change in the decree of 
providence, as inexplicable as it was welcome. His only 
fear began to be that providence might change its mind 
and cause something—as inexplicable and unexpected as 
what had already taken place—to bring his hopes to 
naught. He would wake up in the morning with an aw¬ 
ful fear that destiny had changed direction in the night; 
that this radiant vision of stepfathers and groceries had 


402 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


been destroyed. And he would scan his mother’s face 
with dread to find the confirmation of his fears—asking 
her at length, if its testimony seemed inconclusive: “Are 
we . . . still going to live there?” He did not know— 
how could he—that his obvious eagerness for the change 
herself so greatly dreaded, made her martyrdom the 
more. For she could not disclose to her son the sheer 
mainspring of necessity that moved her. She could not 
tell him that what brought such joy and interest to his 
thoughtless youth, was, in some sort, the crucifixion of his 
mother’s soul. And against his boyish pride in the ac¬ 
quisition of a stepfather, and his ill-concealed enthusiasm 
for the shop in High Gate, and all that pertained to it, 
she had no word to say. This act of choice was hers, 
not his. But it hurt her. Oh, it cut and hurt her to be 
the recipient of his unguarded confidences; to note the 
pride that got the better of his tongue; to mark his readi¬ 
ness to leave this home; his impatience to be associated 
with all that mortified her. 

If only her resources had permitted it, she would have 
striven to keep the evil indefinitely at bay. But she per¬ 
ceived with something akin to desperation, that her 
slender store was trickling to its end—with that illusory 
acceleration which marks the passing of the last grains of 
sand through the neck of the hourglass. If she delayed 
the inevitable day too long, its evil would be but the more. 
Not as a pauper, surely, could her pride consent to be 
the wife of Air. Burford. All her self-respect recoiled 
from the necessity to disclose her straitened circum¬ 
stances to him, or undergo—perforce—the degradation 
of his aid. And so, when the Councillor attacked the 
subject of their marriage in a more practical vein, saying 
to Airs. Holmroyd: “Now ma’am. Surely I’ve given 
you time enough to think things over and get your mind 


THE CRUCIBLE 


403 


prepared. Don’t you think we might be settling our 
plans and getting things in motion? When people of our 
age decides upon a step like this, there’s no call for long 
delays. At our time of life long engagements seem 
ridic’lous, and exposes us to folks’s laughter. I propose 
ma’am, that we should push our plans forward without 
delay, and get comfortably settled.” 

... So when the Councillor spoke thus, standing in 
his overcoat on Mrs. Holmroyd’s hearthrug, with his 
broad shoulders to the grate, and his square felt hat, brim 
uppermost, upon the table, she could only tremble with 
an inward spasm of alarm, and keep silence for fear the 
spoken word might injure prudence and betray her into 
the power of her own weakness. 

“Well ma’am?” the Councillor urged her. “Don’t you 
see the force of my argument? Don’t you think, so long 
as we’ve made up our minds to get married, that it’ll be 
wiser for us both to waste no time, but get the whole 
business over and done with, and settle down comfortable? 
Life won’t last for ever, ma’am, for either of us. There’s 
nothing in the world to wait for, that I can see. Me and 
you’ll be older; that’s all.” 

It was the last of her resistance. She took no further 
stand against his wish. After all, her pride had enjoyed 
the poor comfort of submitting to his persuasions; it had 
been spared the pressure of necessity. The only time she 
asked for now was just such time as might be necessary 
to wind off the skein of the Spring Bank Gardens life and 
free herself from the obligations of her present home. As 
for the furniture . . . 

“Why, you won’t need that now, ma’am,” the Councillor 
decided, passing his practical, business eye over the effects 
displayed to view% in one comprehensive and depreciatory 
glance that made Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart beat faster. 


404 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


“Not need it?” she stammered weakly, not daring for 
very shame to champion what his eyes and voice had so 
emphatically disparaged. 

“There’s as much furniture as ever you’ll want, and as 
good (I venture to say) up yonder, ma’am. You won’t 
want to encumber yourself with a lot of old rubbish— 
even if there was room for it at the other end. But there 
isn’t.” 

She looked and listened with a face of white dismay, 
but the Councillor was too preoccupied with his task of 
bland dispraisement to note the havoc wrought within his 
listener’s feelings. “I should pack it all off to the sale¬ 
room, ma’am, and be done with it. Not that it will fetch 
a deal—is that there table mahogany?—but it will be out 
of the road. You’ve not much upstairs in the bedroom 
way, ma’am, I believe? I’ve never been myself; I’m only 
going by what I understood Annie to say after she’d paid 
you a call one afternoon.” 

Against such masculine authority she dared not pit 
herself. She said after a pause, in a voice directed obvi¬ 
ously to his better feelings,—a voice of veiled imploration: 

“These things are of old association. For me . . . 
they have a sentimental value.” 

“Aye, ma’am, sentiment!” the Councillor concurred, in 
an indulgent tone which made her a present of the quality 
for what it was worth, whilst showing his practical con¬ 
tempt of it. “But we can’t live on sentiment, ma’am. 
That’s what I find in my business, at all events. Cus¬ 
tomers doesn’t come to me for sentiment. They come to 
me for Value—and unless they get it they’ll go elsewhere. 
What’s sentiment when you look at things sensible? It’s 
only a hindrance ma’am, if you let it interfere with 
practical affairs. There’s individuals in the Council 
Chamber, and as many more outside it, that talks senti¬ 
ment to hide their lack of common sense. ‘Don’t remove 


THE CRUCIBLE 


405 


such and such a pump,’ they say. ‘It’s stood there since 
I was a lad.’ ‘Aye,’ says I, ‘and what use is it now that 
every house has water laid on to its kitchen? I’ll wager 
not a bucketful’s been drawn by anybody this past two 
years. Folks has grown a deal too proud to be seen 
fetching their water from a pump in public. They’ll only 
condescend, nowadays, to go out to fetch beer.’ Take 
my advice ma’am, and don’t give way to sentiment. It 
doesn’t pay.” 

She protested: “Oh, Mr. Burford . . .You do not 
surely mean all you say. This pianoforte ... I used to 
practise on it as a girl. My mother . . .” She could 
say no more, for many memories choked the source of 
speech, and she turned aw r ay her head to hide the tears. 

“Why ma’am,” said the Councillor, embarrassed by 
this unexpected sequel to a harangue whose delivery had 
impressed him not a little, as serving to give his future 
wife a hint of the eloquent commOn-sense her husband-elect 
was able to disseminate upon occasion. “I wasn’t refer¬ 
ring to the piano, particular. I was speaking general, 
you understand. So far as the piano goes”. . . He bent 
on it an eye of judicial condescension, “. . . I won’t say 
but what we can’t find room for that.” 

She plucked up courage to thank him. “Indeed, I hope 
so. I should be most grateful . . .” and linked the table 
quickly to the favour granted, and some of the pictures, 
and the mirror . . . 

“To be sure ... to be sure,” the Councillor accorded. 
“We can find a place for a few old odds and ends, on 
which you set particular store. But . . .” he crimped 
his brow and turned it about the four walls of the room as 
if to suggest the difficulty of the task she set him. “I hope 
you’ll be reasonable, ma’am, and bring no more than what 
there’s room for. Such things as carpets and window 
curtains and slates and schoolbooks would be best got rid 


406 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of. They’d only be lumber where they’re going to.” 
This she did not contest. Its material truth was too 
patent to be argued. And yet, for her, even the humblest 
objects that had once formed part of her home; nay, had 
formed the outer portion of her very self (as to Mrs. 
Holmroyd it seemed), had a value almost individual. 
They were,—so she had sometimes phrased it to her inner 
ear, “the soul’s anchorage”; something by which in hours 
of grief and moments of adversity she could stabilize the 
violent fluctuations of self and feel unchanged by reason 
of the companionship of things long known. To enter 
this strange man’s house with no reminders of the old 
life left, was to break association with the past. He for¬ 
feited nothing. His home, his shop, his daily round— 
all the familiar extensions of himself remained unchanged. 
He gained a wife; he gave up nothing of environment. 
She, on the contrary, must needs lose all, or most, and 
find what comfort she could amid surroundings strange 
and story less. Little by little (so she felt) her life was 
being outstripped. That part of it in which her dearest 
thoughts resided was being put off like a skin. Soon she 
would acquire a fresh integument showing nothing of the 
old pattern. 

Slowly she would begin to take on the character of her 
new surroundings; assume the hue; absorb into her in¬ 
most self the tincture of the strange life entered. Nay! 
“God forbid!” her conscience cried out loud within her. 
Through all, in spite of all, must she cling with passion¬ 
ate allegiance to that earlier self with all its sacred 
memories and obligations. That was the nature of the 
reverie into which her thoughts dipped swiftly, with the 
swiftness of a swallow on the wing, as she stood in the lit¬ 
tle Spring Bank Gardens parlour confronting her future 
husband. Some of his words in her abstraction she failed 


THE CRUCIBLE 


407 


to hear, but she returned to consciousness of his voice. He 
was asking her to “call round to-morrow, ma’am, and take 
a look at the house. It’s time you did. I venture to think 
there’s not much you’ll find—or seek—to alter. But 
you’re going to be mistress, and it’s only right you should 
have a voice in things. I’ll tell you quite straightforward 
that I’m a man that doesn’t care for a bit more change 
than there’s any reason for. The house has suited me 
well enough for twenty years—and I believe I know you 
well enough by this time, ma’am, to think it will suit you. 
With all her faults Annie was a good housekeeper. She 
overdid it, we all know. She’s been spring-cleaning ever 
since I let her know that things was settled betwixt us. 
She says she’s not going to have you come into the 
place and cry shame on her, and you shan’t be able to 
throw the dust of the house after her when she’s gone. 
She won’t be there to-morrow, ma’am. That’s why I 
should like you to call then, if quite convenient. She’ll 
be going to stay with her Aunt Matilda after awhile.” 

. . Yes. I’ll tell you quite straightforward that 
I’m a man that doesn’t care for a bit more change than 
there’s any reason for.” The phrase sank deep into her 
consciousness. She, the woman, was being asked to 
change her name, her home, her habits, everything. He, 
the man of business, who had no use for sentiment, was 
yet bound tight enough to institutions by a something not 
more rational than sentiment, albeit of a tempered hard¬ 
ness and dignified with a sterner name. Through his 
marked desire to gratify and please her, his deference to 
her feelings, his obvious care to misrepresent himself to 
her in nothing, but to take his stand on the uncompromis¬ 
ing pedestal of common-sense—she yet divined more 
clearly, the closer she approached to it, the narrow nature 
of the life awaiting her. 


408 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


2 

To nobody in Daneborough did Mrs. Holmroyd shrink 
from making the disclosure of her impending marriage 
more than to Elizabeth. She shirked it so effectually in 
fact, that Elizabeth spared her all initiative by bringing 
the news to her own door, where—on entering—she flung 
dramatic hands to heaven, and cried with the emotional 
fervour that agitated her withered frame on the slightest 
occasion: 

“Oh missus ! And you never told me!” 

For Elizabeth it was a fresh evidence of the world’s 
conspiracy against her. Mrs. Holmroyd had withheld 
the news on purpose. This deliberate secrecy was but 
part of a design. 

“You’ve finished with me’m!” the old woman declared. 
“Now you’ve gotten Joe Burford, and will be Mayoress 
one of these fine days, you don’t intend to have nothing 
more to do with me. You’ll be same as Miss Burford. 
You’ll be overproud to have me about the place, for fear 
I might tell the servants I’d a chance of being Joe Bur- 
ford’s mother if I’d liked.” 

Elizabeth’s shaft—wildly though she sped it—struck 
the target if it did not pierce its centre. Her awareness 
of this painful convergence of their two destinies in the 
Burford circle had troubled Mrs. Holmroyd deeper than 
she dared admit. What Elizabeth’s undaunted independ¬ 
ence had declined, her own extremity had accepted. She 
was oppressed with the humiliating sense of stooping to 
fallen crusts, rendered unsavoury by association. And 
she felt no easier in spirit when Elizabeth, harping on 
a theme dear to her heart, exclaimed: 

“Aye’m! I ought to ha’ took him when I’d chance. 
Lots o’ folks has told me so. If I had ’a’ done I should 


THE CRUCIBLE 


409 


be living in yon fine house now, with other women charring 
for me.” She praised Mrs. Holmroyd’s wisdom, that 
would have been a lesson to her (she said) ‘nobbut it 
had come fifty year before.’ “I thought then’m, that I 
should be able to work for ever. Who wanted old Joe 
Burford i’ them days, wi’ his mucky aud appron and 
muffin basket? I was a deal keener to be free to earn 
my own meat wi’ my own hands. But if I could ’a’ seen 
then what I see now. Hands doesn’t last for ever, nor 
eyes’m. Nor friends!” she added with a terrible gesture 
of despair. “Nay’m! Friends is the first things a body 
loses. No matter how hard you work, nor what you do 
for them’m, they’ve finished with you moment you begin 
to fail.” 

But her first energies of despair, dying down beneath 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s gentle assurance of faith, welled into 
the customary tears, contrite and supplicative. She 
hadn’t meant it. She’d spoke too hasty. “Don’t you 
be angry with me’m,” she begged, “and turn again me 
for what I’ve just said. It’s true of anybody but you. 
You’d never act like other people, I know.” And her 
tremulous ambition besought but one boon of Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd’s clemency. “Let me come and work for you when 
you get yonder!” she supplicated. “Aye, do’m! You’ll 
only keep one servant. You’ll want someone to come on 
Mondays to wash. I’d rather come and wash for you,” 
she cried, “than anybody in Daneborough.” And her 
triumph was terrible to see when Mrs. Holmroyd— 
touched by the dread spectacle of old age warring, single 
handed, against the world—gave the necessary sanction. 
“Aye! I knew it! I knew it!” Elizabeth declaimed, in 
a voice of such passionate conviction as made the globe 
ring on the little chandelier; for she stood in the passage 
just beyond the parlour door. “I knew you'd stand by 
me. I knew you wouldn’t throw me aside like Her! 


410 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Oh’m! I’d give all I’ve got to see her face when I tell 
her what you’ve promised, and let her know I shall be 
charring up yonder long after she’s gone.” 

“. . . Make mischief’m ?” she protested, in response to 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s shocked admonition, “il/e’m?” she em¬ 
phasized reproachfully. “I’d scorn to do such a thing. 
It’s not my way’m. But I shall be forced to tell her when 
she asks me. For she’ll ask me’m. I know she will. It 
wouldn’t be her if she didn’t.” 

And on the next occasion of her working for Mrs. 
Holmroyd she brought the tidings of a terrible encounter 
with the Councillor’s daughter. The big black shawl in 
which Elizabeth stood enveloped tossed like a thing alive, 
diabolically agitated by the emotions underneath it. She 
had told Miss Burford . . . Ah! she had told Miss Bur- 
ford things to make the heart of any widow turn cold. 
“Mrs. Holmroyd is a lady . . .” she had told her. 
“Which you never were and never will be.” “Mrs. Holm¬ 
royd knows my value a hundred times better than what 
you do. She’s begged me to work for her. Yes. I’m 
to get the place fit for her to come to. Mrs. Holmroyd 
says (this). Mrs. Holmroyd says (that).” All the in¬ 
dignation long pent up within Elizabeth’s bosom had been 
given (so it seemed) additional authority by being passed 
through Mrs. Holmroyd’s lips. Mrs. Holmroyd con¬ 
stituted the mouthpiece of all that Elizabeth’s triumphant 
anger had to say. 

“Oh! if you could ’a’ seen her face then’m!” she cried, 
her triumph blind to the altered countenance confronting 
her. “If you could ’a’ seen colour she turned. Red and 
green—and at last as white as yon tablecloth. Oh, it 
would ’a’ done you good’m.” 

Remonstrance with such uplifted passion was vain. 
Mrs. Holmroyd could only bow her head to the storm let 
loose upon her outraged feelings. All this, her impotent 


THE CRUCIBLE 


411 


distress divined, was part of the harvest of her reaping; 
part of her judgment. 

Now what in these days of encounter with such com¬ 
promising realities had become of the Great Ideal? 

Little indeed, it has to be confessed. Like some frail 
lantern striving in a gale, so many gusts and blasts had 
blown upon it that at times its flame looked to be peril¬ 
ously overset, if not extinguished quite. For no man cares 
to recall his better motives when he acts deliberately ac¬ 
cording to his worst, and a feeling akin to shame had de¬ 
terred Mrs. Holmroyd from dwelling on the Great Ideal— 
being all too conscious of the doubtful nature of the road 
on which she travelled now to reach it. But the details 
of Elizabeth’s encounter; the judicial sentence passed by 
Mr. Burford upon her scanty furniture, and Oswald’s 
over-eager acceptance of all the terms and conditions of 
the new life, awakened her to a sense of danger imminent 
and real. The Great Ideal must be revived; the smoulder¬ 
ing lamp relit. She had been thinking ( so her reproaches 
ran) too much about herself during these recent days to 
pay true heed to the welfare of her son. She had dwelt 
too utterly on the sacrifice which her motherhood must 
make; too little on the glorious object of it. That she 
must forfeit many of her own most deeply held ideals 
meant nothing, if she could succeed in keeping true to the 
one ideal of Duty. Surety all other ideals were—or ought 
to be—subordinate to this. They were all comprised 
within this one strict law. Duty was the more than half 
of love; the more than half of faith; the more than half of 
charity; the more than half of everything that made life 
livable and justified it to itself. For everything that love 
might do, duty might do. Less brightly, to be sure, but 
not less thoroughly. Nay, was it not the very frame and 
skeleton of love; the hard, strong staff that love itself 
must use to lean on, and that—in love’s hands—put forth 


412 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


its blossoms and flowered like a living shrub? Let her 
sacrifice be complete and noble, not grudged and mean. 
Of what avail was prayer, so long as her poor material 
self resisted all that prayer besought? 

. . * So the lantern was relit, and Oswald—not with¬ 
out some wonder and perplexity and vague disquiet—felt 
once more upon his shoulder the burden of the Great 
Ideal. For already, in his boyish mind, he had been dis¬ 
posed to give up his earlier pact, and every obligation 
contained in it, as readily as he renounced his present 
home—in joyous exchange for the brighter future beckon¬ 
ing him, and shining before his sight like a brand new 
penny. Already, indeed, he had completed his prepara¬ 
tion to exchange the old Best of Fathers for the new. 
And his aspirations, tired of running errands in quest of 
a vague and indefinable Ideal had relapsed comfortably 
upon ambitions nearer home. The double-fronted shop 
in the High Gate to his readjusted vision offered all that 
the most ambitious spirit could desire. And to have a 
broad town councillor for Father, and to live in a house 
standing behind railings and a rockery on the Hunmouth 
Road, seemed in themselves attainments so lofty that it 
damped his ardour to be told these things spelled not 
finality of greatness; that they affected him personally 
not at all, and that still his spirit must press forward to 
its unknown destination, leaving these splendours far be¬ 
hind. But with the quick duplicity of youth he hid from 
his mother’s searching look all the more incriminating 
evidences of his culpability. Through his momentarily 
flagging underlip, and the tremour of his eyelids beneath 
a gaze more searching than his guilty eye could bear, Mrs. 
Holmroyd divined something of the boy’s trouble, flinch¬ 
ing under the burden reimposed. But he possessed the 
fickleness of mind that is one of the most touching at¬ 
tributes of youth; the prompt reaction to fresh needs and 


THE CRUCIBLE 


413 


appetites aroused; so putting aside obediently the bright 
new playthings of his fancy which were his hourly solace 
now, he took up—at his mother’s wish—the thumbed and 
tattered and neglected primer of ideals, and studied dili¬ 
gently at her knee the book he had believed and hoped for 
ever laid aside. And to earn the praise which is so pre¬ 
cious to the young, he acted the part which he knew by 
experience that his mother most desired to see him play. 

44 . . . And shall I go to the Grammar School, now, 
mother?” he asked, and she answered—after just a mo¬ 
ment’s hesitation—“Yes, dear.” 

It was perhaps less dazzling, this Grammar School, to 
an imagination that had once fed on the immoderate de¬ 
lights of flour bins and humbug bottles and candied fruits 
and sugar scoops. But he tried his loyal hardest to make 
the best of the Ideal; stimulated his pride once more with 
thoughts of grammar-schools and mortarboards, and 
sought to puff up his stature to the dimensions of the 
great things expected of him, keeping nevertheless the 
closest watch upon occasion, like some obedient dog that 
knows itself forbidden to solicit food at table, and yet 
builds terrific hopes on the beseechful moisture of its muz¬ 
zle and the supplicative brightness of its eyes. Who 
knows! . . . Who knows. ... So thought this little boy 
within himself. Even hopes come true at times. 

3 

And now they were arrived at the last weeks of un¬ 
certainty and expectation. They were come, indeed, so 
close to the inevitable that Mrs. Holmroyd’s misery out¬ 
grew all wish or effort to prolong itself against the evil 
hour, and was possessed only of that last desire of the 
truly wretched—to drain their cup and drown anticipa¬ 
tion in reality. Yet despite this fact, so many tasks and 


414 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


duties called upon her time that—in her rare moments 
of leisure, when the true self could escape from the net¬ 
work of necessities—she even reproached her conduct with 
indifference, saying: “I do not feel things as I should. 
Surely, there are a hundred claims upon my sadness, and 
yet I never heed them. Can it be that I am become 
hardened; that my feelings have lost their finer edge?” 
Curiously enough, her apprehensions that had, at one 
time, filled all the future with dismay, were resolved now 
into a single dread of the marriage ceremony. She 
dreaded the ordeal of strange eyes; the moment of pub¬ 
licity that should expose her to the scrutiny of a carnal 
world,—repeating to herself, as though the invocation 
were a prayer: “Oh, if it were only over!” The years 
that were to follow seemed as naught by comparison with 
those few brief moments of publicity; that narrow, bitter 
portal of experience through which she would be con¬ 
strained to pass. 

Almost every day the Councillor’s broad and well- 
blacked boots traversed the Spring Bank pavement, and 
after a prefatory knock his large hand pushed open Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s door. The subject of the marriage cere¬ 
mony offered a theme of close deliberation between them. 

“We don’t want no unnecessary fuss, ma’am,” the 
Councillor had told his future wife. “Neither of us. In 
our case it’s not called for. We’re not going into mar¬ 
riage with any silly, nonsensical ideas, and our heads 
stuck up in the clouds, as if we was young people. We’re 
walking into it in a reasonable manner, and it would be 
a mistake in my humble opinion to make more of that 
business than what it is. Something plain and simple, 
ma’am, would suit me—and I venture to think you’re of 
the same way of thinking.” 

The Councillor’s “venture to think” had all the force 
of a behest. He used it, as Mrs. Holmroyd had by this 


THE CRUCIBLE 


415 


time come to be aware, as an imperative expression of 
his will, and she had already assumed that secret attitude 
of mind which sought its refuge in submission. And 
though she more than shared the Councillor’s desire for 
simplicity, the need of it hurt her none the less. All the 
dignities and decencies of what by right should go to 
constitute the act of marriage seemed lacking. They 
could no longer stand before the sight of God and man 
with that uplifting pride in the rightness of their mutual 
choice, and faith in one another. Not—as on that first, 
ineffable occasion—could she move towards the altar 
steps, sustained by love undoubting and undimmed. That 
love, she knew despairingly, had been given once for all. 
Such bridal veil as now alone she might rightly wear was 
the thick veil wrapped about her feelings, to keep the 
inner eyes from seeing the truth too clearly. For her 
and him—she realized with pain—the solemnities of mar¬ 
riage were a mockery. And yet, something in her nature 
cried out for, and seemed as if it could not dispense 
with, these very solemnities which reproached and mocked 
her spirit with the blessed food of which it lacked the 
power to partake. To his suggestion of being married 
at the Register Office, “very quiet, ma’am,” Mrs. Holm- 
royd did indeed offer an emphatic opposition. Where 
questions of common-sense were in debate she yielded to 
his wish nine times out of ten without a word,—just as 
she might have laid her submissive hand upon his offered 
arm. But the higher spiritual altitudes had come to be 
acknowledged tacitly as hers. Here, in a region of the 
judgment compromising no pounds, shillings and pence, 
the Councillor gave way to her with a great air of con¬ 
descension and magnanimity. The mere sight of Mrs. 
Holmroyd’s shocked face had been sufficient to make him 
instantly withdraw his suggestion. 

“I see it doesn’t exactly meet with your approval, 


416 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ma’am,” he said. “And I’ve no desire to force you, nor 
nobody, against their feelings. The Register Office would 
be nice and quiet, and I’m well known to the Registrar, 
who’d do anything to make things comfortable for us 
both. There’d be no sightseers let in to stare out of idle 
curiosity at business that doesn’t concern them. But I 
see you don’t like the idea ma’am, and so we’ll drop it. 
I’m willing to meet your wishes in the matter. If you 
don’t care for the register office, how would my place of 
Worship suit you?” 

He referred now to the stark, stone chapel in Friar’s 
Gate, built after the pattern of a child’s house with free¬ 
stone blocks in place of wooden bricks, and the alternative 
(it transpired) suited Mrs. Holmroyd no better. Already 
she had made it clear to Mr. Burford that their marriage 
must be understood to cost her no part of those religious 
observances to which, from childhood, she had been used, 
and to which both by conviction and deep association she 
was indissolubly bound, and the Councillor had said at 
once: “To be sure, ma’am. To be sure. I’ve nothing 
to say against that. It’s sound and reasonable, and 
stands to common-sense. I should be sorry to interfere 
with anybody’s religious views. ... I suppose, ma’am,” 
he added; “you don’t mean to imply that you’d entertain 
any objection to accompany me now and again to my 
place of worship? I venture to think you won’t consider 
that an unreasonable thing for a man to ask of his wife. 
I give you credit for not being bigoted, ma’am.” 

And she had said—though not without misgiving, know¬ 
ing too well the dangers of compromise in spiritual af¬ 
fairs: “Certainly, Mr. Burford. I should have no ob¬ 
jection ... to going with you occasionally to Friar’s 
Gate.” 

“People would look for it, ma’am,” he told her with 
a voice that had manifestly gained in courage from her 


THE CRUCIBLE 


417 


assurance. “They’d expect to see us worship together 
after we was married. I don’t necessarily mean as a 
reg’lar thing. But as frequent as can be arranged agree¬ 
able to us both. As far as I’m concerned,” he said with 
great toleration, “I flatter myself I’m a broad-minded 
man in most things, or I shouldn’t have the confidence 
of the burgesses of the West Ward to represent them 
at the Council table. And I shouldn’t object to sit be¬ 
side you at your place of worship, ma’am, on special 
occasions and so forth.” 

He did not tell her, to be sure, that in the course of his 
private cogitations he had come to see in the approach¬ 
ing marriage a favourable opportunity to cultivate a 
closer contact with the Established Church. Up to the 
present he had been held fixed to his place of noncon¬ 
formity by the force of circumstances. Nothing in his 
life of inflexible routine between the house, the business 
and the Council Chamber, had offered the least excuse for 
any loosening of the rivets that bound him (to all out¬ 
ward seeming) to the Wesleyan belief. And yet, apart 
from the strength of its external hold upon him, the rigid 
compactness of its observances into which from boyhood 
he had been wedged and mortared like one of the stones 
of the chapel’s self, the Councillor’s religious opinions 
were less dogmatic than the uncompromising attitude 
with which, in public, he subscribed to them might have 
led outsiders to believe. He had, at least, mixed with 
too many men and too many opinions in the Council 
Chamber and Mayor’s Parlour to be indifferent to the 
material advantages attaching to church membership. 
Theologically considered, the Councillor’s opinions on any 
aspect of religion were negligible; and it is not unreason¬ 
able to suppose that he had kept faithful to his first fold 
for the same reason that many husbands remain con¬ 
stant to their wives—that is to say, for lack of the requi- 


418 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


site encouragement to infidelity. But neither he nor Miss 
Burford was unaware of the stigma of inferiority under 
which their own particular religious body laboured in the 
eyes of social Daneborough. The knowledge rankled deep 
in both their bosoms, though the Councillor had wit to 
case his resentments in a breast of masonry, and show 
to the world a four-square front that seemed impervious 
to slights or envy. Miss Burford’s resentment of the 
superior pretentions of church-going Daneborough was, 
on the contrary, alert and acrid. To collide by accident 
with the fashionable stream of worshippers from St. 
Gyles’s was to bring instant defiance to her head, and 
sharpness to her nose and scorn to her eye. She af¬ 
fected to despise church-going as a mere outlet for pre¬ 
tentiousness and display. People only went to church, 
according to Miss Burford, to show themselves off and 
try and make the world believe them of more social im¬ 
portance than they were. “I suppose she thinks herself 
Somebody!” had been one of her contemptuous pronounce¬ 
ments on Mrs. Holmroyd, “because she goes to Church! 
I declare I haven’t patience with such people. They 
haven’t any religion at all; their worship is nothing but 
show.” 

Despite her breach with her father, she took care to 
keep in constant touch with him, for—though she had 
a daughter’s injury to vindicate, she had also a woman’s 
curiosity to satisfy; and there were many points about 
this monstrous marriage which her indignation burned to 
know. Despite her vehement protestation to the contrary 
she had deigned to accept temporary shelter with her 
brother and his wife in their narrow-chested raw brick 
villa forming one of a terrace off the Hunmouth Road, 
so recently come into existence that its nether end was 
still a sandpit and depository of builder’s debris, the 
whole area being impregnated with the odour of mortar 


THE CRUCIBLE 


419 


and unseasoned wood. Here a bedroom was being slowly 
prepared for her under her personal supervision, and to 
all acquaintances she spoke of herself as being already 
driven from her home. She still slept, however, under 
her father s roof, and whilst professing to take no further 
part in the direction of the house, but saying in regard 
to all matters referred for her judgment: “Don’t ask 
me. I don’t count for anything any longer. I’m No¬ 
body!” claiming to be, in point of authority, the in¬ 
ferior of her father’s servant, whom (saying she never 
troubled, interfered with, or corrected now) she neverthe¬ 
less found ample opportunity to interfere with and repre¬ 
hend a great deal. 

She had prophesied to more than one of her acquaint¬ 
ances—all of whom were quite willing to insinuate sympa¬ 
thy with Miss Burford’s cause for the confidential re¬ 
wards that such ephemeral allegiance brought them—she 
had prophesied: “Mark my words! I would never be 
a bit surprised if the marriage was actually to take place 
in Church. She’s capable of Anything. And as for my 
father ...” To him, putting the aspersion adroitly into 
the mouth of the world, she said, choosing her oppor¬ 
tunity : 

“A nice idea! Causing people to talk about you as 
they do, and saying the wedding is going to take place 
in Church!” 

“Well,” said the Councillor after awhile, in a tone be¬ 
tween repudiation and contempt. “And what if it is?” 

“What if it is!” Miss Burford expostulated, roused by 
the triumph of conviction. “Do you mean to say you’re 
actually going to let that woman drag you where she 
pleases, just to gratify her pride and vanity?” She 
drew in the breath of indignation through her tightened 
nose. “You that’s worshipped Wesleyan all your life.” 

“Is that to say,” her father asked deliberately, “that 


420 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


there’s no other places of worship but what’s Wesleyan?” 

“Ah!” she cried, with a light of terrible comprehension 
breaking out upon her face. “So that’s it, is it! That’s 
what she’s brought you to. If I didn’t think so! You’ll 
be going to church with her on Sundays before long, like 
the rest of them. That’s what you’ll be doing.” 

Her prediction, made in that acrimonious key, was not 
unwelcome to the Councillor. She had flung the gauntlet 
down to him in anger, and by a little diplomatic show of 
resentment he might with better credit pick it up and 
charge the consequences to her. 

“Well? And suppose I do?” he said. “You’ll only 
have yourself to blame, Annie. It’ll be you that’s driven 
me, not her. I don’t know what sort of Christianity you 
call yours, but if it’s the sort of Christianity one gets by 
attending chapel ... I venture to think I shan’t get a 
deal more harm by going to church. . . . There’s one 
thing, though,” he added. “Whether a man goes to 
church or chapel, he doesn’t need to ask permission of 
his daughter, nor of nobody. Wherever I go to I shall 
go to please myself.” 

“Do you call That religion?” his daughter challenged 
him severely, at a blind end for an answer. “Is religion 
pleasing oneself I’d like’to know?” 

“Why, so far as you’re concerned,” her father an¬ 
swered imperturbably, “it’s neither pleasing oneself nor 
nobody, Annie. It’s being as ill-tempered as you can, 
and trying to make everybody else the same. There’s 
not more real religion in your nature than would cover a 
threepenny bit, and it doesn’t become you to talk about 
other folks’ religion, whatever sort it is, so I’m telling 
you, Annie, and I’m your Father.” 

All things considered he was by no means dissatisfied 
with this encounter. 


THE CRUCIBLE 


421 


“Well, she knows now,” he complimented himself. “She 
can’t say I haven’t told her.” 

And the more he thought over the episode the better 
pleased he was with the turn his policy had given to it. 

“As a member of the Corporation I’ve got to be broad¬ 
minded and reasonable. There’s more places of worship 
in this town than one, and more feelings to consider than 
mine or hers. It’s only natural for *a man to pay his 
wife the compliment of attending her place of worship, 
so long as she’s willing to do the same by him. I venture 
to think there’s nobody of common sense can quarrel 
with it.” 

And in pondering the idea he found increasing satis¬ 
faction with this propitious opportunity to plant one 
foot in the established faith, and come to handshakes with 
the Clergy. 

“The worst of nonconformist bodies,” he told himself 
for his instruction, “is their bigotry. They’re that nar¬ 
row. Folks that’s too closely connected with their own 
sects and sees no good outside them, gets warped. 
Annie’s warped. Her friends is warped. I can see it 
now. I’ve been inclined to get a bit warped myself, and 
to look on churchgoers as if they wasn’t hardly Chris¬ 
tians. Well, I’m glad to say I’ve seen the error I was 
making before it’s got too late. I don’t want to meet a 
better Christian than my future wife. She’d be a credit 
to any Body or place of Worship. And if the clergy calls 
upon Us there’s nobody will know better how to receive 
them. That I do know. And I venture to think they’ll 
get no better treatment in any parishioner’s house than 
what they will in mine.” In such wise he held forth to his 
inward ear, formulating the phrases with self-importance, 
and listening to them with appreciative pride. And the 
more he delved into the subject the more sanction he was 


422 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


gratified to find for his contemplated movement to the 
Church. “I live in St. Saviour’s parish,” he reminded 
himself. “The church isn’t more than a stone’s throw 
from my own front door. It is common-sense to leave 
one’s wife at the porch on a wet morning and then trudge 
another half mile under a dripping umbrella to Friar’s 
Gate, as though my wife’s worship wasn’t good enough 
for me?” 

“And beside . . .” he continued to himself, and to the 
other listeners in his imagination, “ . . . after a man’s 
been married in a place of worship, it has associations 
that he’s got to consider.” Unconsciously he adapted 
Mrs. Holmroyd’s terminology and point of view to his 
own more practical necessity. 

“If I can go to church for my convenience, it’s only 
right and fair to go again for theirs. I gave Friar’s 
Gate its turn when I was married the first time, because 
my wife worshipped there the same as me. But it’s not 
to be supposed that a man’s bound for ever by what he 
does once. It isn’t business. Customers doesn’t tie 
themselves to me; they go where it suits them, and religion 
stands to be the same. I’ve customers from all the lead¬ 
ing bodies, and it’s no bad thing to show oneself well 
disposed. Church can do a lot for a man when it wants. 
A church-warden in a place of worship like St. Gyles’s or 
St. Saviour’s has a lot of influence, and is very much 
looked up to. By all classes.” 

And thus arguing the whole theological position, and 
balancing its pros and contras, he felt more than satis¬ 
fied that Mrs. Holmroyd was a churchwoman, and that 
he had so handsomely acceded to her wishes. For the 
Mayor of this important Borough, close parochial re¬ 
lationship with the established faith would not fail to be 
a valuable asset; it would tend to magnify the importance 
of his office; give him a status not vouchsafed to mere 


THE CRUCIBLE 


423 


dissenters, and commend him by his toleration and notable 
broad-mindedness to those more influential circles whence 

despite the robe and chair and chain of office—true 
mayoral glory cometh. As he said to himself: 

“I think I can venture to congratulate myself that 
things has turned out just as they have done. I’ve no 
anxieties about the step I’m going to take. Unless I’m 
very much mistaken, she’ll be a great comfort and a great 
help to a public man like me. She’ll be just the sort of 
wife a man in my position ought to have!” 

And each time passing the church that was ta exercise 
such fatal influence upon his future, he cast a new and 
almost proprietorial look upon its grey stones, parapet 
and tapering spire, as if the sacred edifice had been a 
prospective branch of his High Gate business, shortly to 
be opened to the public. 

“If only Annie had been sensible and took what’s hap¬ 
pened in the right way,” he ruminated more than once, 
regretfully, in gazing at St. Saviour’s as he walked to 
business, “we might perhaps have done the thing a bit 
more public. It isn’t every day a Town Councillor gets 
married.” 

He indulged himself, however, to this luxurious regret 
without entertaining the least misconception as to the 
possibility of obviating the thing deplored. Annie being 
what she was (he told himself) any attempt at a wedding 
on the grand scale—even if Mrs. Holmroyd had been 
willing—might only end in unpleasantness and failure. 
And Councillor Burford was certainly too good a man 
of business to risk unnecessary expenditure for a bene¬ 
fit so problematical. No, no, (said he with resolution) 
let them take up their married life very simple and quiet 
first of all, and go cautious in all things until they found 
their feet and saw exactly where they stood. If this 
wedding was proclaimed too loud and open, there’d be 


424 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


many folks expect to be invited to it whose acquaintance 
(said the Councillor to himself) he wasn’t so particular 
anxious to encourage. Such a function would have a 
tendency to emphasize his social circle and fix him in it; 
and he saw no reason to be fixed in any circle, or bind 
himself to friends that wasn’t (strictly speaking) such 
particular friends of his after all. This was an age of 
progress, and with such a wife as he’d had the foresight 
and good fortune to provide for himself, he wouldn’t 
venture to say wliat is social circle in the ancient “Bor¬ 
row” might ultimately be. 

“If any woman can help a man to get what his public 
and private capacity entitles him to,” said he; “it’s Her. 
So long as she’ll row in the same boat—and I have con¬ 
fidence she will—there’s no telling where we shall end be¬ 
fore we’ve finished. Other men’s done it, and I venture 
to think I’ve got as much practical common-sense as 
them.” 


It was a significant morning for Councillor Burford 
when he passed St. Saviour’s on his way to worship at 
the Friar’s Gate Chapel, and told himself with satisfac¬ 
tion as he scrutinized the weathered fabric: 

“Well! They’ll have something to talk about this 
morning. I’d give a good deal to be sat in there, so as no 
one could see me, and study their faces. I daresay 
there’s one or two won’t be unprepared for it—but there’s 
others will be took by surprise.” 

He was referring to the banns of course, which were 
to be published that morning for the first time of ask¬ 
ing; a fact responsible for Mrs. Holmroyd’s absence from 
church. 

She shared in nowise her future husband’s curiosity to 


THE CRUCIBLE 


425 


hear the proclamation read, or to note its effect upon the 
assembled congregation. The mere thought of such pub¬ 
licity was so painful that she felt she would not dare to 
worship in the church again until the marriage was ac¬ 
complished, and she had come to working terms with fact. 
She stayed at home instead, striving to evade the pub¬ 
licity of her own thoughts, and keeping far removed from 
the window lest any passer-by should catch a sight of 
her. She knew that the Councillor would be sure to ask 
her on the morrow with complacence: 

“Well, ma’am! And how did things go off with you 
in church on Sunday?” and she would be at trouble how 
to answer him, for fear—in the effort to save two sets of 
feelings—she might wound both. 

. . . But if she hid herself at home, and Councillor 
Burford curbed a wandering curiosity in chapel, asking 
himself from time to time: “Well! Is it over by now? 
Has it been made public yet?”—Oswald, in his place in 
the dim chancel beneath the conglomeration of stained 
glass, heard the portentous announcement and turned 
his ear to drink in every word, suffused with pride to 
know himself the very son of the Widow of This Parish 
(as the violent elbow of his neighbour in the choirstalls 
notified) and to be the future stepson of the Joseph 
Henry Burford who owned the big villa on the Hun- 
mouth Road, and part of the Mansion House, and would 
some day be Mayor of Daneborough and go to church and 
public functions with a gold chain round his neck. And 
he—through whose consciousness these glorious reflections 
ran like the sands through the waist of an egg-timer, 
imparting delicious shivers of consequence and urgency— 
he, the thinker, was Oswald Holmroyd, who had had the 
best of fathers, and was foredestined to the best of 
futures. Ah! it was a supreme, immense, prodigious mo¬ 
ment, in which the very roof of imagination shook and 


426 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


lifted like the church itself when the sixty-four feet pedals 
stirred its pulses, and the Rate Collector lifted his nose 
to heaven and said: “Sublime!” 

The newly married couple were agreed to have no 
honeymoon in the accepted sense of the word. To Mrs. 
Holmroyd the thought of such an expedition for the pur¬ 
pose of enjoying the dead fruits of this second marriage, 
filled her with inexplicable wretchedness. She would have 
suffered anything rather than protracted leisure in which 
to taste, beneath the artificial flavourings of joy and hap¬ 
piness, the bitterness of truth. For her part, she said, 
she would prefer to enter upon their new and actual life 
with the least loss of time, and the Councillor—who was 
never a very happy man away from business and the en¬ 
grossments of the Council Chamber; and who had himself 
opened the subject to Mrs. Holmroyd by hinting a fear 
that he would not be able to offer her much in the way 
of a honeymoon (ma’am) at this season of the year—ap¬ 
plauded sentiments so agreeable to his own, with the 
heartiness that recognized a difficulty removed. Still, 
since convention almost demanded that a newly married 
couple—even of their maturity—should retire from pub¬ 
lic observation to practice the first intimacies of the 
wedded state, it was decided that they should spend a 
few days at Spathorpe, for the sake of propriety. “I 
shall have to be back at business on the Friday, ma’am,” 
the Councillor decided. “That and Saturday’s my busy 
days, and there’s a lot of new proposals that needs my 
attention in the Council Chamber. I can’t very well be 
spared just now.” 

The disposal of Oswald during this brief period offered 
some difficulty, and Mrs. Holmroyd had indeed cited her 
son as one of the considerations disinclining her to leave 
home. The suggestion, to be sure, was very gently made, 
and she laid no insuperable stress upon it, but the Coun- 


THE CRUCIBLE 


427 


ciUor showed more decision in ruling out this feature of 
her argument than she relished. 

“What, ma’am!” he said. “Why . . . that boy of 
yours is big enough to look after himself by this time, I 
should hope, without no need for his mother to do it for 
him. He can’t always expect to have hold of your apron 
strings. When I was not much more than his age, I’d 
begun to earn my living in earnest. Livings had to be 
earned in them days. You’ve got to think about your¬ 
self some time, ma’am; you’ve got every bit as much right 
to be considered as him.” 

He spoke with the comfortable candour that seemed to 
have only her interest at heart, and sought to let her 
understand that his wife-to-be constituted, now and here¬ 
after, the speaker’s charge and care. But the homily 
blew like a chill wind across her heart, and caused pre¬ 
sentiments to shiver faintly as if they had been wet leaves. 
It was just such a speech as, uttered earlier, might have 
weighed heavily against the speaker on her oscillating 
beam of sentiment, but until this moment the Councillor’s 
interest in Oswald had seemed the perfect reflection of 
her own, and her hopes—looking everywhere for comfort 
—had presumed too much upon the semblance. He had 
taken Oswald by the sleeve; pinched the lobe of the boy’s 
ear between a solid thumb and forefinger; greeted him 
with a face and voice indicative of satisfaction, and had 
passed judgment upon the boy’s intelligence and natural 
abilities in terse but favourable phrases that caused his 
mother’s heart to swell. 

“He’s a smart enough lad, ma’am. He ought to do 
something . . . some day.” 

Until now the Councillor had appeared to hold Mrs. 
Holmroyd and her son in an equable regard, as if she and 
he were one and indivisible. But this hint of separation, 
as though their interests no longer were in common, but 


428 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


stood within sight of the parting of the roads—this hint 
disturbed her and made her voice and courage fail. 

“We can surely find somebody to look after him,” the 
Councillor said. He was referring still to Oswald and 
the question of the boy’s disposal during their absence. 
“Why ... I daresay my son would have been agreeable 
to take charge of him for the few days we’re likely to be 
gone—if it hadn’t been for Annie stopping with them. 
One couldn’t reasonable expect him to have ’em both. Is 
there no neighbour of yours, ma’am, who’d be disposed 
to take him in? It’ll be „ . . let’s see; it’ll only be four 
days at the outside, and it’ll learn him to be independent 
and look after himself.” 

Once upon a time she would have been courageous 
enough to tell him that her son’s happiness was dearer 
to her than her own, and that she would consent to leave 
him nowhere, and in no hands, where that happiness was 
not likely to be secured. But already the influence of 
this stronger sex began to fall prophetically across her 
mind like an encroaching shadow, effacing more and more 
of her woman’s power to will and strive. The hope in 
her mind; the hope she had half determined to reveal, 
yet dared not, was that Oswald might be privileged to 
occupy the little bedroom awaiting him in their new home. 
It hurt and disappointed her that no proposal to this 
effect fell from the Councillor’s lips, but no idea seemed 
farther from his thoughts, and she could not broach the 
topic to a mind so blankly unprepared for it. Had their 
positions been reversed, and this son were his—not hers— 
her lips would have teemed with considerations for his 
sake, but the Councillor’s lips lent her no help. She said, 
with the meekness that confessed a hope renounced: 

“I will see what can be arranged.” 

And before the evening fell she had made arrangements 
to board Oswald with the next-door neighbour. Now 


THE CRUCIBLE 


429 


that her trusted staff of hope had failed her, she clung 
almost prayerfully to the alternative hope that the Ren- 
cils might divine her difficulty once again, and come at 
the eleventh hour to her aid with an offer to take charge 
of Oswald as on that previous, scarcely less melancholy 
occasion. And Oswald indulged the hope too, filled with 
rekindled ambition to taste afresh the wonders, splen¬ 
dours and soul-stirring kindnesses of the Organist’s 
house; to look out of the lofty big bowed window upon 
the world below; right down the Hill Gate to the Man¬ 
sion House, and to know himself admitted into the very 
sanctuary of the Organist’s home life; a sharer in all its 
merriments, delights and glories. But no such second 
proffer came. Only—one evening—there arrived at the 
house in Spring Bank Gardens a fellow-chorister of Os¬ 
wald’s who had been given this journey by Mr. Rencil as 
an agreeable alternative to scale practice—two pupils (it 
seemed) having collided at the same hour, each being dis¬ 
missed on a separate errand in order to make way for 
the other. He knocked, after hesitation, at the door, 
and said “Hello!” to Oswald who opened it, asking, with 
a parcel in one hand and a letter in the other: “Is this 
where you live?” Oswald answered in the affirmative, and 
was revolving in his own mind how, with dignity, he might 
impart the information that he lived here only for the 
present, and would be moving shortly to more commodi¬ 
ous premises on the Hunmouth Road, when the fellow- 
chorister pushed the letter and the parcel into his keeping 
with the remark: “Here! Take hold of these, then, 
and give ’em to her. Mr. Rencil sent ’em. With his 
compliments, I was to say. I wish I hadn’t gone for my 
lesson to-night. I very nearly didn’t. I should ’a been 
playing Reliev-0 now.” With which he took his leave 
at a run, leaping each alternate step and thumping each 
alternate door with his doubled fist as he sped noisily 


430 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


down Spring Bank Gardens. Oswald, divining something 
of consequence in this unusual combination of letter and 
package, bore them excitedly to his mother, crying as he 
ran: “Mother! Mother. . . . From Mr. Rencil.” His 
exclamations and the sight of what he held brought the 
blood to her face in a swift tide that was half of joy and 
half of pain. Tears rose instinctively to her eyes for 
an emotion already apprehended, and her fingers trembled 
as they tore open the envelope addressed to her in Mrs. 
Rencil’s writing. 

“Dear Mrs. Holmroyd,” (the brief note ran, diffusing 
round about her as she read the faint, sweet perfume 
associated in her recollection with the Organist’s wife). 
“. . . My husband and I ask your acceptance of the 
accompanying small present as a token of our very 
kind regard, and of our joint good wishes for your 
happiness in the new life, upon which—we understand 
—you will so soon be entering. We thought that the 
little book-slide might be useful. I remember your say¬ 
ing how pleased you were with mine. My husband did 
all the woodwork, and I am responsible lor the lining 
and the tiny silk bookmarker. We hope they will serve 
to remind you of us both, and bear testimony to our 
very kind remembrance of you. 

“Once again, dear Mrs. Holmroyd, wishing you every 
happiness in the new life, which—we are both agreed— 
nobody better deserves. 

“Ever sincerely yours, 

“Ethel Rencil.” 

That was the letter, though she could scarcely read the 
wording for the tears that stood in her eyes; and Oswald 
eagerly awaiting exclamations of astonishment and rap¬ 
ture, constrained by this unexpected change in her, 
dropped his gaze and turned embarrassed to the window. 


THE CRUCIBLE 


431 


The letter, caressing her with its tender perfume, as if 
it had been a soft hand, or a hushed, kind voice, touched 
her to the heart. For awhile she could only stand silent, 
wrapped in this atmosphere of human sympathy and 
kindness; suffering a gratitude so deep, so tremulous, so 
poignant, as to be almost a pain. And yet, a pain of 
such sweet sorrow as to satisfy the deepmost necessity of 
her soul. Pain like this, sadness like this, aching grati¬ 
tude like this ... Oh! they were nearer to heaven than 
mere happiness. In those brief moments life itself 
seemed little; love was all. A wondrous sense of the in¬ 
finite possessed her; a sense of the eternal curtain of com¬ 
passion drawn between kindred souls and darkness. 

“How can I ever thank them!” she said at last. 
“Dear friends . . . Dear friends!” She pressed the let¬ 
ter for a moment to her lips and replaced it in its en¬ 
velope with fingers that expressed reverence. She had 
never looked for such a gift from them. It roused who 
knows what hopes in her. She clung to their unlooked- 
for act of friendship as the drowning cling to a hand, 
seeking the comfort and assurance of it long after it has 
saved them. If she had but hearkened to the impulses 
that surged within her she would have gone without delay 
to bear her gratitude in person, whilst yet an intoxication 
of thankfulness warmed her heart and lent words to her 
lips. But reason prevailed with her. She read afresh 
the letter whose first perusal had so flushed and gratified 
her. And again she read it, and as she read the earlier 
glamour seemed to fall away from the written page like 
the glow from an evening sky when the sun sinks west¬ 
ward apace; and where the splendour and promise and 
loveliness of friendship had once been, now was only the 
drear, chill light of disillusionment. Clearly could she 
read the words at length, with eyes undimmed. Their 
loveliness had lain in her own tears; her own emotions, 


432 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


long pent up, had only used this page of scented friendli¬ 
ness as a vent for their outflowing. Word by word she 
pulled the periods to pieces as if they had been petals, 
trying to wrest from them the secret of their creation. 
“A token of our kind regard” (she read). “. . . We hope 

that they will serve to remind you of us both . . .” 
“Our very kind remembrances . . “Every happiness 
in the new life—which nobody better deserves . . 
Yes. These sentences exhaled a delicate and fragile 
friendliness, but of the future . . . not one word. They 
were phrases of sweet finality, laid like precious flowers 
upon a grave; tributes to the past, and to the happiness 
gone with it. This letter, this book-slide were dedicated 
to their dead, or dying, friendship. With the Mrs. Coun¬ 
cillor Burford of the new life to which, so tenderly, their 
wishes wafted her, they had naught to do. Slowly, from 
that first great exaltation, she sank despondently upon 
her loneliness, as the sick do who rise ecstatic from their 
pillows to clasp an empty and dissolving vision. 

She was wrong (of course) ; emotions, overstrained, 
misled her. The balance of her judgment was not fine 
enough to register exact distinctions. And yet, she was 
not so wrong; she had come very near to truth, in miss¬ 
ing it. Mrs. Rencil’s note concealed much labour in its 
folds. Three imperfect drafts had gone to the making 
of it, and its final form owed not a little to her husband’s 
aid. 

“Help me, Arthur,” she had begged him. “It is an oc¬ 
casion on which I feel that I would like to say so much. 

. . . And yet . . .” Her eyes sought those of her hus¬ 
band, to solicit his understanding without the use of words. 

“I know,” he acquiesced. 

“It is so difficult,” she confided, “when one’s sympathies 
are so deeply involved. I don’t want to say anything in¬ 
judicious. But I don’t want to say too little. How will 


THE CRUCIBLE 


433 


this do, Arthur? Listen,” She read it to him, and bit by 
bit between them the note that Mrs. Holmroyd finally 
received was written. 

“Do you think it sounds quite . . . genuine?” the 
writer asked. “As if it had been written in a spirit of 
real friendship? Or does it read a little bit stilted and 
constrained? Poor thing! I do wish she had been mar¬ 
rying somebody worthy of her; somebody one could really 
like, and take an interest in. The whole thing is too 
sad. I feel as if I were losing a dear friend—just at the 
moment when I had come to know how deeply fond I am 
of her. I fear we shall see very little of her now. 
What, Arthur?” Mr. Rencil had not spoken. He had 
only gazed out of the window through the strong lenses 
liquifying his brown eyes, as though—through his wife’s 
voice—he listened to heaven’s annunciation of the first 
notes of a new anthem. 

“I’m afraid not,” he said. 

“And I felt,” his wife continued, studying the sheet of 
writing paper in her hand, “that Mrs. Holmroyd was 
just the sort of friend I had been wanting. A real, close 
friend, Arthur, that I could have placed all my con¬ 
fidence in.” 

“Have you no husband, Ethel?” he asked of her, with 
his sudden winsome smile. 

“You know I have,” she said. “But I mean someone 
of my own sex, whose friendship I might have enjoyed 
without jealousy. With so many women, Arthur, friend¬ 
ship seems only a pretext for spitefulness; it is like the 
cream on sour milk. The only way some women can en¬ 
joy friendship between themselves is by being unfriendly 
towards others. Mrs. Holmroyd was a curious excep¬ 
tion. I never heard her utter one single unkind word. 
More than once . . . her sweetness has been so irresist¬ 
ible that I have almost had it on my tongue to propose 


434 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


that we should call each other by our Christian names.” 
She sighed. “Perhaps it is well that I never did. It 
might only have made things more difficult. What a 
nuisance all these silly social distinctions are!” she said, 
as though to disclaim a personal responsibility. “One 
feels so powerless. Why mayn’t we be friends with any- 
body, just for friendship’s sake? Llowever ... I sup¬ 
pose we can’t. It isn’t possible. So long as Mrs. Holm- 
royd remained just her own dear self—with no relations 
or acquaintances to consider—it was one thing. But as 
Mrs. Burford ... it does become so awkward. One has 
one’s other friends to think of. And the Burfords are 
all strong Wesleyans,” she added. “Such narrow, un¬ 
sociable, joyless people. They don’t understand music, 
Arthur, and they look with disapproval on anything but 
money. You get no pupils from them," 

“Still . . .” the Organist remarked at last. “I sup¬ 
pose that Councillor Burford will be Mayor, some day.” 

“Yes. I suppose he will,” Mrs. Rencil said, and she 
picked up the letter from the writing table. “Let me 
read it to you once more, Arthur, and hear how it 
sounds.” 

But Mrs. Holmroyd had no husband to appeal to; only 
her own, uncertain self. And doubtful now of all emo¬ 
tion likely to mislead her, she waited till her heart was 
cold enough to write with prudence. Even the mere 
transcribing of her gratefulness brought back a glow of 
mild unreason that she found hard to restrain, but at 
last the letter was completed. 

“Dear Mrs. Rencil,” (she wrote) 

“How can I possibly find words to thank you and 
your husband for your good wishes, and for the lovely 
present which you have sent me? Such an unlooked- 
for token of your kind remembrance has touched me 


THE CRUCIBLE 


435 


deeply, and I can scarcely say how much I value the 
gift, for its own sake and yours, and for the sake of 
the many happy memories which it will serve constantly 
to recall. 

“Be assured I am not likely to forget all the kindness 
and sympathy which I have received so abundantly at 
your hands, and I shall never cease to look back upon 
this chapter of my life with a gratitude deeper than 
I know how to express. 

“Most faithfully yours, 

“Margaret Hester Holmroyd.” 

Studiously she had avoided the least allusion to the 
future; the least appeal to a friendship from which, in 
heart, she felt herself cut off—albeit, kindled by the 
gratitude that she tried so discreetly to reveal, she 
yearned to throw herself upon its mercy and crave such 
crumbs as, in her altered state, it might still be disposed 
to give to her. And Mrs. Rencil, touched though she 
was with the writer’s gratitude, did not fail to note the 
air of sad finality; the tone of mourning for friendship 
and kindness of the past. She showed the note to her 
husband, underlining its significance for him with a finger 
as he read, and thus—on each side—motives were sought 
and countered, and doubts multiplied, and a thin, fine 
web of mutual uncertainty spun its divisive veil between 
them. 

5 

These last days were days of unutterable wretchedness 
for Mrs. Holmroyd. She had not conceived how ter¬ 
rible, to her, would be the liquidation of their little home. 
When the hour arrived at last for its dismemberment, and 
Elizabeth appeared in her black shawl as the embodiment 


436 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


of destruction—it seemed to her as if they slew some liv¬ 
ing thing. These tables, chairs, carpets, curtains—even 
the meagre fragments of linoleum—possessed for Mrs. 
Holmroyd a life and sanctity of their own. They were 
not pieces of dissociated furniture, but vital elements of 
corporate existence; each dependent on the other; each 
necessary to the other; essential to the home they stood 
for. And now, to separate them all by violence, was like 
the tearing out of tongues. This home, that once had 
been, and now so shortly would be no more,—it cried to 
her with a penetrating voice; she could not bear it. 
Worst of all was the ruthless fervour that Elizabeth 
brought to her task. Nay! It was not fervour; it was 
ferocity. The old woman’s very youth came back to 
her, regalvanized by this golden opportunity to indulge 
the long frustrated passions of her life. The hand that 
seized and tugged, the arms that lifted, were remorse¬ 
less. Lost in the rapture of her work she heard no voices 
crying to her heart for mercy from this ravished home, as 
Mrs. Holmroyd did. Like a hawk, too, she hovered over 
the doomed house, scenting prey and plunder. Her pre¬ 
datory instincts were aroused; there was nothing so out¬ 
worn and perished but that it protested still some value 
in her eyes. She begrudged the meanest victory to the 
dustcart. To strips of ragged oilcloth—confessing their 
full wretchedness now that they were torn from their sur¬ 
roundings—old curtains, broken blind-cords . . . she at¬ 
tached her hopes with terrible solicitude, demanding of 
Mrs. Holmroyd: “What’s to be done with this’m?” 
with an anxious voice, and an eye unable to conceal the 
sharpened intensity of its longings. Nor did she once 
suspect, nor did Mrs. Holmroyd divulge to her, the sick¬ 
ness of the latter’s heart at being spectator of this dread 
and violent defunction. 

Not till now, when all the happiness and sorrow em- 


THE CRUCIBLE 


437 


balmed in the tranquil atmosphere of her little home were 
being dispersed for ever, did she quite realize how much 
it had meant to her; how great a portion of her life was 
wrapt in it. One strip of evening sunlight no broader 
than her hand, when it lay golden on the bedroom wall, 
smote her like a smile on the features of the dying. This 
bedroom, so often the repository of her earnest prayers, 
in its hour of despoliation assumed a serenity, a peace, a 
loveliness greater than her soul could bear. Thus, and 
thus, had the setting sun laid his finger on the wall when 
Beryl was alive, and Beryl’s voice and smile, something 
of Beryl’s very self were wrought into the tissue of this 
house. Oh! How could she leave it! 

But the fury of Elizabeth abated not. With her brim¬ 
ming pails and scrubbing brushes, her bars of mottled 
soap, and sopping floor-cloths, she moved voraciously 
about her work, diffusing a relentless enthusiasm that 
offered sentiment no quarter, whilst her pile of household 
spoils accumulated in its special corner in the kitchen. 
Hard to suffer though Elizabeth’s distinctive fury might 
be, she was—at least—a merciful alternative to the hor¬ 
rors of the salesroom and the brutality of the auctioneer’s 
hammer. As each doomed piece of furniture made its, 
last, mute supplication to Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart, she 
said: “I cannot! No, I cannot! Sold, it shall never 
be.” And its sentence was commuted into charity; let it 
be slain by gift, but not by barter. “Would you like to 
have this, Elizabeth?” 

“Oh, mum! . . .” 

“I know that you would take care of it.” 

Aye! That she would. Be very sure she would’m. 
It should be stood here’m, or it should be stood there’m, 
in her little house—where Mrs. Holmroyd might be free 
to call and see it, any time she chose. “For don’t think 
I shall part with it’m. Don’t think I shall ever take 


438 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


it . . . you know where. Nay. Not me’m! I think 
too much about it, and You.” 

Tears of thankfulness, like holy water, Elizabeth shed 
upon each gift in turn, and through the blessedness of 
giving, Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart escaped the direr penalties 
of sacrifice. Her home was being not altogether broken 
into fragments; not altogether scattered to the four 
winds. Somewhere, in unstrange hands, some part of it 
would still preserve its ancient atmosphere of love. For 
of Elizabeth’s fidelity to her new charge Mrs. Holmroyd 
never entertained a doubt. 

“I shall look after them,” she cried, “until I die’m. I 
shall be as careful of them as if they was yours. Oh’m! 
Nobbut I’d had these last year, I could have let splendid 
for the Race Week.” 


BOOK XI 


THE SACRIFICE 

1 

A T half-past eight on the fateful morning, Mrs. 

Holmroyd left her home with Oswald for the 
last time. She dared not trust herself to take a 
farewell look at it, lest the action might deliver her to 
her weakness, or betray the nature of this leave-taking 
to unseen eyes; for though Elizabeth was sworn to secrecy, 
and had pledged her sacred word to keep the kitchen un¬ 
til Mrs. Holmroyd and her son should be far remote 
from curious sight, the discretion of old age is frail, and 
Mrs. Holmroyd hastened to put herself beyond its reach. 
A pale sun began to part the curtains of a mild October 
sky, and the morning air partook of both the freshness 
and languor of autumn, impregnated with the faint mel¬ 
ancholy of dead leaves. Here and there a milkcart 
drawled its course, and the flash and rattle of its cans, 
and the milkman’s whistle, accosted Mrs. Holmroyd’s 
senses with a curious distinctness and novelty—as if they 
were familiar things noted for the first time after sickness 
or bereavement, recharged with that significance of which 
health and daily habit tend to rob them. At the corner 
of the street she turned to give one hasty glance behind. 
Already a group of figures gathered round about her 
door, recruited by the forsworn Elizabeth, who raised 
dramatic hands to heaven from a circle of rapt faces. 
But their curiosity fell without harm upon her at this 
distance, like feeble rays of sunlight, and in a moment 

she had turned the corner into the broad Horse Green. 

439 


440 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


Her thoughts were busy and her heart was full, and she 
and her son walked in a silence unbroken on either side. 
From time to time Oswald raised curious eyes to his 
mother’s face, as if to seek the necessary guidance from 
it for his own demeanour. He would have welcomed 
sanction to display his self-importance to the world at 
large, and to reveal—through suitable deportment—the 
full consequence of this early morning expedition on which 
they were engaged. But his mother’s face encouraged no 
expansion of the pride, and so he did his best to pitch 
his feelings in her key and find his satisfaction in a pro¬ 
digious solemnity. To which end he tried to walk, and 
look, as much like Councillor Burford as was possible, 
absorbed in matters of municipal concern, carrying in 
his right hand the spray of white chrysanthemums for 
Beryl’s grave with the gravity of a mace-bearer. As 
they traversed the Horse Green and came within sight 
of High Gate, Mrs. Holmroyd suddenly addressed her 
son, albeit without turning her head or gaze towards him. 

“Oswald.” 

“Yes, mother.” ; 

“Just look round, dear. Do you see anybody?” 

“Yes, mother.” 

“Who?” 

“Elizabeth.” 

“Whereabouts is she?” ' 

“Just at the end of Spring Bank Gardens. She has 
seen me, mother. Now she has stopped.” 

“That will do, dear. Don’t look round agar * 

The spirit of Elizabeth, indeed, roused to a terrible 
pitch of excitement, had been able to bear no longer the 
cruel inhibition laid upon it. That she should keep house 
whilst Mrs. Holmroyd married at St. Saviour’s the son 
of him whose widow—but for providence and her own 
folly—she might this day have been, transcended human 


THE SACRIFICE 


441 


power. This was no time to hold by oaths or honour 
pledges. And so well had she bestirred the feelings of 
her auditors outside Mrs. Holmroyd’s doorstep that forth¬ 
with, intoxicated with her own excitement, she hastened 
in the wake of Oswald and his mother, consumed by one 
desire—to reach the church before the ceremony should 
have started. And so did her anxieties play tricks with 
time and delude her tortured senses, that every second 
seemed an hour, and the wedding ceremony had taken 
place a dozen times before her stumbling feet reached the 
Horse Green. The sight of Oswald and his mother threw 
all her fears into disorder. “They’re there!” she cried, 
staggering in her black shawl. “He’s looked round. 
He’s seed me! He’s told her. And I promised faithful 
. . . She’ll never forgive me now ! I’ve lost my charring.” 

Aghast, with one hand pressing the tight-clasped house- 
key beneath her palpitating heart, and the other nipping 
the two edges of the prolific shawl about her stricken 
person, she retreated into Spring Bank Gardens, where, 
out of sight behind the corner, she leaned against the wall 
and wept foreboding tears into her shawl. But tears 
were impotent to quench the raging fire in her bosom. 
She had seen Joe Burford’s father buried. Should she 
fail to be witness of his son’s marriage to her old mis¬ 
tress? Nay, not her. Let them do what they liked at 
her after, she should not falter at this moment, when so 
much de ended. And like a bird of dark omen she hov- 
erec the trail of Mrs. Holmroyd and her son, trying 
to con ^.herself from sight with the ludicrous deception 
of old age that deceives only the deceiver. 

2 

The spectre of Elizabeth, casting its fitful shadow over 
an event that should have been serene and open, and not 


442 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


(as now) furtive and perplexed, served to deepen for Mrs. 
Holmroyd the atmosphere of subterfuge and shame in 
which she moved. Her heart contained no anger against 
the frail delinquent who thus broke faith and followed. 
In a world of Mrs. Holmroyd’s choosing none would have 
been more welcome at her marriage than this old creature 
in the black shawl. And even now she said: “Poor 
thing!” and grudged Elizabeth nothing of her pilfered 
satisfaction. But such a wedding as this . . . before 
such a witness as that that followed. . . . Oh! it seemed 
a shabby, sordid, loveless, hopeless thing. All these weeks 
she had been trying hard to learn a liking for this man 
who was so soon to be her husband; to learn it off by 
rote, as if it had been a lesson, and say it over to herself 
until by repetition it became a part of her, and conscience 
could forget how painfully the task had been acquired. 
And she believed she had succeeded . . . till now. At 
the narrow junction of the Horse Green with High Gate 
she trembled under a sudden fear that from their big 
bowed window the Rencils might catch sight of her upon 
her ignominious journey, and she walked more quickly, 
with averted head. The thought of Joseph Burford 
awaiting her arrival at St. Saviour’s Church, in a posture 
of complacent confidence, sure of himself and her; un¬ 
doubting, imperturbable, filled her conscience with dis¬ 
may. It came to this: in her own small house, in the 
seclusion of her own small world, before no witnesses, her 
acceptance of him had seemed natural and possible. But 
here . . . beneath the open sky, before the eyes of the 
world, she was ashamed of her choice of him; of her 
husband to be. That was the sordid truth of all her 
shrinking. If this husband had been some other than he 
was . . . some other such as she might love and honour; 
some other, say, like Arthur Rencil, smiling at her with 


THE SACRIFICE 


443 


his eyes of winsome sadness through their liquefying 
glasses. . . . 

Nay! At that, shocked into sudden horror and de¬ 
testation of herself, she turned upon these thoughts and 
trod their sinful smoulder underfoot. Had she no higher 
sense of reverence and gratitude towards one whose timely 
worship saved her, and hers, from dire extremity? Had 
she no finer sense of duty, faith, and honour, than to ac¬ 
cept so much from him to whom her love could give so 
little in exchange? Within the churchyard, stooping to 
adjust the spray of white chrysanthemums on the green 
mound that marked where Beryl lay, she offered up a 
heart-felt prayer to heaven that she might be assisted in 
her loyal effort to make herself a true wife to him whom, 
so shortly at God’s altar, she would take for better or 
for worse. Perhaps her prayer, though it could have 
gained no added fervour, might have been lengthened; 
but the ominous shadow of Elizabeth, perceptible beyond 
the railings, drove her inside the dreaded church. 

3 

Of all that marked the features of this marriage she 
was acutely, poignantly aware. Her senses sank on a 
sudden to a state of penitential calm, like some boisterous 
wind that drops at sundown and leaves a world that 
listens only to its own silence. The spacious dimness of 
the church, though offering refuge to her more external 
self, lent no comfort to the inner; it only served to em¬ 
phasize her littleness. Here and there, in the central 
gloom that brooded between walls pierced with the vio¬ 
lence of stained glass, she saw sparse heads above the 
woodwork of the pews; hats of women—though whether 
there for worship or from curiosity she knew not. They 


444 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


moved as she entered, and the rustle of the baize door 
multiplied itself throughout the empty church in whis¬ 
pers. A certain mild expectancy mingled with the torpid 
atmosphere of unpreparedness. The sabbath sanctity 
seemed gone; put off like a vestment. Only the outward 
features of solemnity remained, animated by no conscious 
spirit of reverence or worship. Pulpit and lectern dozed 
in their coverlets of calico, with the figures of last Sun¬ 
day’s hymns staring apathetically from their oaken board. 
It was a house of worship in undress. 

From somewhere out of the obscurity of the aisle the 
person of the verger detached itself, approaching Mrs. 
Holmroyd with the swiftness and directness of purpose. 
He shed something impalpable from his finger-ends in 
coming, with an airy, almost graceful gesture, as though 
he scattered benedictions, and his floating robes diffused 
odours of rappee and alcohol. Impeccable though his 
manner was, Mrs. Holmroyd’s sharpened consciousness 
detected accents of a certain secularity. He bade her 
“good morning” in the voice of almost conversational 
brightness, and imparted the information that “Council¬ 
lor Burford’s sat waiting of you in the chancel. I’ve put 
him in Mrs. Bankett’s pew. I’m not sure whether Mr. 
Todd’s come yet, but I’ll let you know. He won’t be 
late, I feel confident, for him and me has to take an in¬ 
terment at the Cimitery this morning.” With these 
words and a tribute to the favourable character of the 
weather, he led Mrs. Holmroyd up the church at a pace 
smarter than the one reserved for Services and Sundays. 
If she had been some client paying a visit to her lawyer’s 
office (it seemed to her) she could not have been more 
sensible of the purely business air investing the pro¬ 
cedure. The curious calm and clarity of her state of 
mind magnified, no doubt, the slightest impressions made 
upon it, and showed trifles more momentous than they 


THE SACRIFICE 


445 

were. For it is sure that the verger only sought to set 
her at her ease, and to impress his personality upon the 
bridal consciousness in its brightest and most helpful 
light, but Mrs. Holmroyd felt aware of a subtle absence 
of solemnity in her surroundings, as if a semi-surreptitious 
function such as this could not in reason hope for 
the full sanctification and blessing of the church. 

In one of the chancel pews the Councillor awaited her, 
seated beside a large, inverted silk hat. He half rose to 
make way for Mrs. Holmroyd, shook her hand briefly as 
she passed him, saying: “Good morning, ma’am,” in a 
voice depressed to the tone of the edifice they sat in. But 
neither he nor she had any word to say to one another. 
The strangeness of their conjunction in these surround¬ 
ings made them seem strange to one another. To Os¬ 
wald the Councillor gave no sign of recognition, but re¬ 
seating himself broadly at the pew-mouth after Mrs^ 
Holmroyd’s admission, blocked all further entry, and Os¬ 
wald—after a moment of irresolution—took refuge in the 
pew behind. In this atmosphere of speculation and con¬ 
straint he found himself all at once bereft of the self- 
importance that had filled his bosom up to the present, 
and he became once more but a little boy, waiting curi¬ 
ously and anxiously upon events, with no very clear per¬ 
ception of the duties incumbent on or expected of him, 
nor of what would be his fate. It seemed evident to 
him that a ceremony which imposed such deadly silence 
upon all participants, and transformed so utterly his 
mother and the Councillor, must possess elements of grav¬ 
ity for which he had not sufficiently allowed. His ig¬ 
norance had always associated weddings with bells and 
cakes and great rejoicings, and he found it hard to 
reconcile what he had previously believed about such 
things with this dread silence of reality. Not less than 
her son was Mrs. Holmroyd sensible of the oppressive 


446 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


silence of the church, as though it had no comfort to 
impart nor consolation to breathe over them. And 
though she knew that one note of music would have dis¬ 
solved all the resolute compression of her courage into 
tears, she could not help longing for the voice of the 
organ to awake the sanctity that was asleep, and lift her 
heart from its bed of clay to some place nearer heaven. 

An unimaginable time they seemed to sit there, op¬ 
pressed beneath the weight of silence, during which she 
strove in vain to pray coherently, and the Councillor 
drew out his watch, and made the circumference of his 
silk hat with a coat-sleeve. The frigid aloofness of this 
uncongenial place of worship, so different from the half 
secular and reassuring air of nonconformity, made him 
ill at ease. And the business man’s respect of punctuality 
chafed against the least liberties with time. And then 
again, this feeling of impotent attendance on the con¬ 
venience of a curate rubbed dignity on the raw. He was 
disposed to reproach himself with having consented to 
come here at all; he owned no sympathy with church 
ways; he would have done better to insist on the Register 
Office. From this point of view his reproach shifted to 
lay the blame upon a false desire for privacy. 

“If Annie’d been what a man’s daughter should have 
been by rights,” he reflected irately, “there’d have been 
no occasion for me to come to church in a hole and cor¬ 
ner way like this. This is no sort of wedding for a Town 
Councillor. It’s neither one thing nor another. We 
ought to have done the whole affair on proper, business 
lines whilst we was about it. We might have had the 
Mayor and half the Corporation present, and who’s to 
say under them conditions we couldn’t have arranged for 
Canon Quexley to conduct the proceedings respectable.” 
For a few moments out of humour with himself, the world, 
and his surroundings, he was even conscious of a certain 


THE SACRIFICE 


447 


resentment towards the woman by his side; but this he 
promptly quelled. “It’s no use blaming her,” he told 
himself emphatically. “It’s not her fault. She’s not to 
blame any more than me. But it’s unfortunate for us 
both, as things has turned out. Very unfortunate. Are 
we to be kept sat here all day? If this is how the church 
conducts its services, such unbusiness-like ways doesn’t 
deserve to get no custom at all. There’ll be our cab 
waiting of us outside by this time.” 

In point of fact they were kept waiting little beyond 
their due time. Almost simultaneously with the snapping 
of the vestry latch and the sound of commingled voices, 
the Curate appeared before the altar, completing the ad¬ 
justment of his hood, and the verger, inflated with a new 
importance, beckoned to them from the end of the choir- 
stalls. Even Canon Quexley’s fleshy forefinger could not 
have conveyed the intimation with more episcopal dignity. 
Oswald, sitting solitary in his pew, beheld his mother 
and the Councillor advance and take their places together 
at the altar steps, beneath the crude blues and cardinals of 
the east window. Now they seemed to be in earnest con¬ 
versation with the Curate; now they shook hands with 
one another; anon they knelt, whilst the verger, standing 
in the shadow of the organ, watched the proceedings with 
a critical eye. At length the Curate ceased to mumble. 
Councillor Burford offered an arm to his mother, and 
Prestwich stepped alertly forward, and he and they and 
the Curate retired to the vestry. Everybody seemed to 
have forgotten Oswald, and Oswald remained rivetted to 
his seat in the chancel pew, asking himself perplexedly: 
“Am I supposed to sit here? . . . Will they come back 
to me? What if they’ve forgotten, and gone out by the 
vestry door!” 

But just as his anxieties were becoming acute, the 
Councillor and his mother returned. They moved down 


448 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


the chancel side by side, the Councillor with chest squared, 
and right arm protruding awkwardly at an angle, and 
the fingers of Oswald’s mother reposing lightly on his 
coat sleeve. The Councillor’s air of caged discomfort 
had given way to a look of visible relief, almost trium¬ 
phant, as if the now surmounted worst had proved less 
formidable than his fears. Indeed, within the vestry a 
great part of this ecclesiastical constraint had been put 
aside. The Curate had doffed his ceremonial voice and 
air, and resumed his suspended humanity once more, con¬ 
gratulating the newly-wedded couple and offering his 
heartfelt wishes for the length and happiness of their 
married life. And the Councillor, taking his proffered 
hand in a broad grip of friendliness that forgot already 
the fretful thoughts engendered by delay, thanked him 
“on behalf of me and my wife.” 

“You’ve conducted the proceedings most satisfactory, 
sir. I’m not a churchman myself, as perhaps you’re 
aware, but I venture to think we couldn’t have been mar¬ 
ried more comfortable in any place of worship, and me 
and my wife’s extremely obliged to you. I hope it won’t 
be the last time I shall attend this church, and I’m sure 
both me and Mrs. Burford will be happy to have the pleas¬ 
ure of seeing you at our own house after we’ve got nicely 
settled down.” To which the Curate had murmured with 
a flush of gratitude, as though the condescension were un¬ 
deserved : 

“How very kind of you l” 

“Well! It’s a beginning!” the Councillor said to him¬ 
self as he left the vestry. “Since we’ve took the first 
step, let’s go on with it. - After all, it will be more grati¬ 
fying when one looks back, to think we was married in 
a church. The church has a dignity and standing—what¬ 
ever some folks say. It hasn’t held its head up against 
all competitors for nothing.” 


THE SACRIFICE 


449 


At first, so straight did his mother’s gaze stream out 
before her, as if she followed the pathway cleared by it, 
that Oswald feared she would have passed him by; but 
as she and her new husband came abreast with the pew 
in which he sat, she detached her hand gently from the 
Councillor’s coat-sleeve and moved to Oswald with a look 
that awed him. Her eyes were gleaming wet; he per¬ 
ceived she had been weeping, but there was a sort of 
radiance about them too, as if they were of stained glass 
like the windows all around, and an inward light shone 
through, flowing from some deep source of splendour. 
Before that flood of liberated feeling, of love, of tender¬ 
ness and strangely stirred compassion, Oswald’s gaze 
flinched and fell. His youth lacked the self-possession to 
meet and to sustain a look of such intensity. But he 
felt, as his mother’s arms encompassed him, and he was 
sensible of the moisture of her eyes upon his face, that in 
some new way she had tremendous need of him; that her 
embrace served the purpose of an appeal ... a cry to 
all that was best and noblest in her son. And his lips 
quivered at this testimony of her faith in him, and at his 
own uplifting faith in the goodness and nobility of his 
nature. There, in the chancel of St. Saviour’s, whelmed 
by an emotion that stirred his very bowels, as the deep 
notes of Mr. Rencil’s organ sometimes did, he vowed that 
his mother should never be deceived in him; that her faith 
and hope should never be betrayed. 

Her embrace was of the briefest. She clasped him but 
a moment and let him go, and took her husband’s arm 
again—with a slight gesture to Oswald that he must fol¬ 
low. Outside the church, not before the main gates but 
by the little iron wicket that Oswald and the choristers 
made use of, a one-horse cab was standing. “I’m sorry 
now it hadn’t been a pair,” the Councillor reflected to 
himself, at sight of it. “It would have been more in keep- 


450 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


ing. This desire for privacy can be carried too far. 
But me and her agreed to keep the whole thing very 
quiet for both our sakes, and I can’t be blamed. We 
said ‘a cab’ and a cab’s what we’ve got. It’s too late 
to make any changes now.” 

By this time the bridal party was close up to the 
little gate. The driver clambered on to the box; the 
verger, bare-headed, held the door open with an ingratia- 
tory smile. A small knot of onlookers watched the pro¬ 
ceedings with the intent interest always kindled by the 
spectacle of other folks’ affairs, and some rice was thrown 
half-heartedly by luke-warm fingers, that rattled with the 
chilliness of hailstones against the cab-windows and the 
Councillor’s top hat. The Councillor handed his new- 
made wife into the cab; his stooping shoulders and oroad 
back followed her, and Prestwich was about to close the 
door when Mrs. Burford’s hand beyond the window made 
a faint movement of deterrence. It was for Oswald. 
Through the re-opened door he stepped into the cab with 
a growing sense of undesiredness and intrusion that caused 
him to diminish his small body into its smallest compass 
on the small front seat. The Councillor bestowed no 
glance upon him. From his mother he obtained the re¬ 
assurance of a strained smile. Through the window, as 
the cab rolled away, he caught sight of the figure of 
Elizabeth, distracted between desire to see and horror of 
being seen, who, wrapping and re-wrapping her tormented 
person in the black shawl, followed every phase of the 
proceedings with a face of convulsive mobility. Os¬ 
wald’s mother remarked the pathetic figure too, and a 
sudden impulse of compassion urged her to give one 
parting sign of recognition—that should serve Elizabeth 
both for acknowledgment and pardon. But the op¬ 
portunity was lost—she knew not how—and the cab moved 
lugubriously on its journey. Its journey was, in the first 


THE SACRIFICE 


451 


instance, to the Councillor’s own house, where a light re¬ 
fection of wine and sandwiches was laid out upon the 
table in the dining-room, as a fortification against the 
impending journey by rail; the cab-horse meanwhile 
jingling its bit before the garden gate, and the driver 
drawing solace from a cold pipe. Time, being limited, 
favoured neither conversation nor eating, and to Oswald 
it seemed as if the repast had no sooner begun than the 
Councillor rose to his feet, watch in hand, and uttered 
a warning: “Well?” He had been cherishing the hope 
of accompanying his mother to the station in the cab, 
and of bidding her a last good-bye at the railway-carriage 
window, but the Councillor rudely broke the hope by say¬ 
ing—“You’ll have to be making your way back now, my 
lad. Me and your mother’s driving straight to the 
station.” The words fell percussively on Oswald’s hear¬ 
ing, and he lifted a face of instinctive appeal, towards 
his mother, but her gaze failed him; his look fell upon 
lowered eyes. For Mrs. Burford had cherished, too, the 
same hope as her son, but she heard the tone of resolu- '■ 
tion in the Councillor’s voice . . . and this was no mo¬ 
ment to dispute a husband’s will. 

“The station is a very busy place, Oswald,” she said, 
as though subscribing to her husband’s greater wisdom. 
But when she kissed him, he knew that her kiss sought to 
speak to him, to tell him that his mother’s heart, at least, 
took no side with this greater wisdom to which both he 
and she must henceforth yield. And all at once, still 
carrying the warmth of her caress, and with her final 
recommendations ringing in his ears, he was “making his 
way back, my lad” as the Councillor had bidden him. 
He walked with his eyes fixed desperately on the shrink¬ 
ing outline of the cab from which, at intervals, emerged 
a microscopic hand, until both cab and hand were gone 
from sight, and then his spirit sank into a sea of utter 


452 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


loneliness, lead-weighted with the feeling of irreparable 
loss. Yes. A voice deep within him seemed to whisper 
that this morning’s marriage had cost him something 
very dear. An element of sweetness had been abstracted 
from life; elements of darkness and bitterness infused into 
it; its composition was changed already; it could never 
be the same again. His secret heart began to confess a 
fear of the future. This new father, to whose acquisition 
he had looked forward with such pride—-he was afraid of 
him. Never once this morning had the Councillor’s eyes 
deigned to dwell openly on Oswald’s inconsiderable per¬ 
son; that the boy noted. They had appeared, rather, 
to avoid him, as if he were some displeasing and unwanted 
object whose too obvious existence they sought to shirk. 
It was borne in on Oswald with dismay that his new 
father did not care for him; that he had never cared for 
him; that this big, broad, burly figure would slowly shoul¬ 
der him out of the place he held in his mother’s heart; 
dispossess him of all that his sonship had enjoyed under 
i the reign of undivided love. And in this hour of utter 
loneliness his heart sickened for the old home, for the 
old life, for his old self, for the old familiar mother, at¬ 
tached by her slender fingers to no man’s arm. 

But the old home was on its deathbed, expiring fast. 
Only just so much life had been preserved in it as to serve 
their necessities over this momentous morning. By night¬ 
fall Elizabeth’s fury would have robbed it of its last 
breath. Now his comprehension, sharpened by distress, 
began to grasp the meaning of his mother’s tears, and he 
perceived what it was that she had wept for. Oh, why 
had she wished to leave this house at all! Why had she 
not explained to him what marriage really meant, that 
he might have besought her earnestly to dwell with him 
forever in the life so dear to both? Immersed in a state 
of sorrow which to Oswald’s childish eyes seemed eternal. 


THE SACRIFICE 


453 


his feet had brought him to St. Saviour’s before he was 
aware. The church divulged no consciousness of all that 
had taken place so recently within its walls. Its tall 
spire, spun into the pale October sky, seemed to hold 
intercourse with heaven; the gilt numerals on the clock 
dial, gravely indicated by the creeping hands of gold, 
caught the sun and gleamed with a steadfast, holy light 
that made Oswald’s grief the more discernible. The 
churchyard was empty, and actuated by a sort of need 
to raise again the cup of sorrow to his lips, and taste 
such bitter dregs as might be left in it, Oswald entered. 
Here was the path they came by, he and his mother. 
Here was Beryl’s tiny grave; a mound of green sur¬ 
mounted by the spray of white chrysanthemums which 
they had laid upon the turf this morning, and over which 
his mother had bowed her head and stood for awhile with 
closed eyes. Oswald stood too, staring at the grassy 
shape through the single pane of loneliness with which 
his life seemed lit. Beryl was down there, he meditated, 
in the narrow place where they had laid her; deep beneath 
his feet, his little sister, whom he had once companioned 
and kissed, and played with. And stirred by a sudden 
impulse to test the silence of her tomb, and learn if—per- 
adventure—his sister’s spirit of a truth resided there and 
hearkened, he said, in a low and urgent voice: 

“Beryl!!” 

. . . The sound of her name, uttered thus audibly by 
his own lips, shocked and startled him, and he looked 
sharply and shamefully on all sides to make sure no ear 
had overheard. After all, it was but his loneliness that 
cried upon her; she seemed nearer to him now, for all 
the feet of soil that lay between them, than his own 
mother. Oh, if his sister had but been alive to-day, that 
he might have charge of her and find in her sorrow as¬ 
suagement and companionship for his own. From time 


454 


THE TREBLE CLEF 


to time, from the distant railway station, the sound of 
whistles reached him in the churchyard silence, and he 
said of this, or that, or the other: “Will that be it?” 

Wearing always his new garment of wretchedness, he 
wandered slowly back to what—for want of any better 
name—he still called “home.” Elizabeth (he reflected) 
would be there by now; he might obtain some moments of 
melancholy satisfaction in her company, helping to de¬ 
stroy the last remnants of the old life; any food was more 
welcome to an empty heart than none. In the High Gate 
he passed the Organist’s door, and long and steadfastly 
he fixed his eyes upon its upper window, and very slowly 
did he walk—praying secretly that the Organist might 
emerge, or that some responsive face might show itself 
behind the window, or welcome hand make signal to his 
hungering hopes. 

But no sign of life caused Oswald’s heart to leap. 
All that seemed left to him now out of the wreckage of 
his once bright world . . . was the Great Ideal. Aye! 
The Ideal. That was the thing to cling to. Let him 
build dreams bright enough to fill his solitude and make 
him independent of the illusive pleasures of this outer 
world. Let him make himself forthwith resplendent with 
high resolve and noble aspiration, so that his mother 
should marvel at the change in him when next she pressed 
him to her bosom. Let the Great Ideal shine from his 
brow like a light set in some upper window: a beacon and 
a pledge. 


THE END 






\ 














fZSI ST AON 




































































